Alphabet’s Drone Delivery Biz Spreads Its Wings

When you’re halfway through mixing up cookie dough and realize you only have garlic butter in the fridge, Wing drones can fly unsalted Kerrygold straight to your doorstep. In certain parts of the US, anyway. Soon, the San Francisco Bay Area will be among them. 

The Bay is where it all began for Wing, which made the announcement yesterday and is housed under Alphabet’s moonshot sector X alongside robotaxi service Waymo. Wing made its first deliveries on Google’s Mountain View campus and has since flown more than 750,000 small packages like meals and office supplies to 2 million customers. 

Wing’s building a national network that can handle one of delivery’s biggest hurdles: the last mile. 

The Last-Mile Problem

Modern supply chains can get packages shipped from China to California in record time but face delays on the final segments of their journeys, where they must reach multiple individual addresses. Drones and groundbound robots from companies like Coco and Serve are looking to speed that up.

Wing, which wants to dominate the skies, already has tie-ups with Walmart and DoorDash:

• By next year, Wing plans to work with 270 Walmarts in major cities like LA and Miami, expanding its partnership from 150 stores. The drone company has also completed tens of thousands of deliveries as part of its teamup with DoorDash. 
• DoorDash also works with Serve and Coco bots. In fact, Wing piloted a program with Serve that’d see Serve robots hand off meals to Wing drones for the last leg of deliveries. (Switching from the sidewalk to the sky makes sense to anyone who’s seen a bot stuck on rough roads.)

Reality Check: In recent years, Alphabet has scaled back X, the sector that houses Wing, laying off staff and spinning out some companies. The “Other Bets” still in X are under pressure to prove they’re more than pipe dreams, especially as Alphabet shifts spending toward AI. This month, the company gave CEO Sundar Pichai a new compensation package that, for the first time, ties a portion of his pay to performance at Wing and Waymo.