The industry is finally at an acceleration point.
In February 2023 U.S. introduced the "Increasing Competitiveness for American Drones Act" which streamlined the approval of licenses for operating drones over American territory.
The advances in Ai have helped develop "detect and avoid" software for autonomous drones.
And at the same time the development of GPUs have allowed these software to be installed on small and light autonomous drones.
It has been 12 years since Jeff Bezos unveiled Amazon's plans to develop "Prime Air" a 30 minutes air drone delivery service. This happened during an episode of the tv show "60 minutes" in November 2013. youtu.be/Fbq6gQVLhWE
Yesterday night I was reading an article about Serve Robotics finance.yahoo.com/nvidia-uber-backing-700-million and I go inspired to make some research into the delivery drone industry. The article talk about $NVDA (+0,87 %) and $UBER (+0,92 %) investment into $SERV . If you don't want to read the full article, actually @BamBamInvest just made a short summary post of it ( https://getqu.in/RoQSMH/ ).
I investigated on "last mile" delivery also known as "backyard / front yard delivery" . So I will not talk about robotaxi, autonomous truck, ships, airplanes nor I will talk about "micro" delivery drones such as those robots that are already heavily used in hotels in China. All of these surely overlap and compete with each other in the delivery service, but talking about these would defeat the purpose of this post.
So here is my summary of notable drone delivery companies and the current state of the industry.
For starters, there are just two types of delivery drones that are being currently "heavily" deployed for last mile deliveries: with "wings" (UAV) and on wheels.
Delivery on wheels are more complicated and don't see much competition. In U.S. the main player is Serve Robotics ($SERV ). In China is Meituan ( $3690 (-1,21 %) ).
Until the beginning of 2024, Amazon ( $AMZN (+0,28 %) ) drone delivery service has completely underdelivered 😅 while other players have taken the lead. One of these is Wing, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet ( $GOOG (+0,4 %) , $GOOGL (+0,36 %) ) wing.com . Wing altogether with DroneUp, flytrex (partner of Causey Aviation Unmanned) and Zipline has completed thousands of commercial air deliveries for Walmart ( $WMT (+0,33 %) ).
Wing has the broadest customer base. It operates for Walmart, Doordash ( $DASH (-0,14 %) ) Coles groceries ($COL (-0,87 %) ), Walgreens ($CVS (+1,44 %) ) and different restaurants. It operates mainly in Australia and US.
Zipline is a private company known for making hundreds of thousands of medical air deliveries in Rwanda. flyzipline.com
It's very active in U.S. , a close competitor to Wing.
In December 2022 a partnership with Jumia ( $JMIA (+0 %) ) was announced to ease up deliveries in Africa, but since then no further development is known.
DroneUp is also private and basically it's a subsidiary of Walmart. droneupdelivery.com
In the U.S. , until 2023 only 5 drone operators had succeeded at getting air carrier certification from the FAA: Wings ($GOOGL (+0,36 %) ), UPS ($UPS (+1,19 %) ), Amazon ($AMZN (+0,28 %)), Zipline and Causey Aviation Unmanned.
UPS operates wit Matternet's droves. Matternet is a private company. They successfully operate and deliver in dense urban environment.
Causey Aviation Unmanned is a subsidiary of the private company Causey Aviation which is a private jet charter. Causey Aviation Unmanned operates through Flytrex as a provider of Walmart air delivery. Flytrex is also private. causeyaviationunmanned.com
Other notable air drone delivery companies are Ondas holdings ( $ONDS (+1,63 %) ) ondas.com . Ondas is known for its military applications in Israel, but it is actually active with Airobotics in the delivery industry airoboticsdrones.com .
The newest Prime Air drone, the MK30, has been unveiled in October 2023 and it's finally being massively deployed bringing Amazon back to the lead.
It’s unlike any other drone being used for package delivery. Faster, quieter, safer, bad weather resistant and very powerful.
At the end of 2024, these new drones replaced the old ones used to deliver in California and Texas. They will also be deployed in a new, third U.S. state and in soon-to-be-revealed destinations in Italy and the UK.
Outside of US, China is leading the way in urban drone deliveries and Meituan ( $3690 (-1,21 %) ) is the current market leader both with UAV and drones on wheels.
In Ireland, Manna Aero, has already completed over 100,000 drone deliveries across various locations in Ireland and is trending to hit more than 1,000 daily deliveries in dense urban markets such in Dublin. Manna Aero is a private company manna.aero .
