Director of Business Operations at Wing on scaling last‑mile drone delivery with DoorDash

Wing is a drone delivery company born out of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” division, now focused on commercial-scale last-mile logistics in the U.S. and abroad. We spoke with a Director of Business Operations at Wing to unpack how the company is scaling a turnkey drone delivery service for partners like Walmart and DoorDash, why they believe drone delivery has crossed from novelty into real utility, and how regulatory moats and FAA approvals are shaping competition in the space.

Can you tell me a bit about Wing and how it fits into the drone market today?

When looking at the last mile logistics space, drone delivery, robotics, etc., I'd say we're still in the very early stages. Unlike sidewalk robots or last mile robotic land vehicles, the last mile delivery drone space is in its infancy. There's a lot of PR noise and movement, but we're not even on first base yet.

Wing has been in the aviation drone space for over ten years. About a year and a half ago, we decided to focus on last mile logistics as a service rather than just investing in drone technology. Previously, Wing was part of Alphabet's big bets organization, where we were doing things like delivering coffees and desserts in Australia (and losing money on every order).

We launched our commercial business about two years ago with a Walmart partnership. When I joined Wing almost two years ago, we were working with two Walmart stores in a pilot phase to determine if customers wanted the service and if it could scale. Today, we're live in over 20 Walmart stores in Dallas-Fort Worth, actively delivering. Last week, we announced an expansion to 100+ stores in five additional metropolitan cities in the US.

Customers are ordering what we call "boomerang" items—a couple of things they don't want to make a trip to the store for. They can order through the Walmart app, website, or Wing's digital property, choosing from about 2,000 Walmart products, and get delivery in less than 20 minutes. We're seeing great repeat order rates, which indicates customers are moving beyond the initial novelty and incorporating the service into their daily lives.

Should we think about these deployments as templates that can be easily replicated in other cities, or are they still one‑offs?

Walmart chose Dallas-Fort Worth metro as their test bed due to the proximity of stores to customers, the climate, and overall demographics. Our operational setup and the Wing “nest” is very lightweight and has virtually no impact on a Walmart store—we put up a parking lot fence, lay down pads, and place a container to store the drones overnight. It's easy to set up within 48 hours, though we do need municipality approval for each new Walmart store location that we do business with.

I think we have a good formula—from setup to customer expectation and reordering, and how quickly Walmart can light it up—that can be replicated in many metropolitan areas across the country, which you can see in the expansion to Houston, Charlotte, Tampa, Orlando, and other cities publicly announced last week. Walmart is the type of organization that wouldn't expand a partnership like this and publicize it if it wasn't replicable, and if they weren't seeing healthy customer reordering rates. They're very customer-focused and working backward from the customer, and if this was having a negative impact on customers or wasn't scalable, they wouldn't expand with us.

Through the past 14-16 months, we've navigated busy days, slow days, bad weather, and various operational challenges. Walmart remains committed to being the fastest retail partner from click to delivery versus anyone. Currently, if you look at the ecosystem, Walmart is first: they're beating Amazon, DoorDash, and Instacart in click-to-delivery via drone, and there's really no one close right now.

Is Wing’s differentiation that it’s providing an integrated platform that’s turnkey, where you own all layers of the stack?

Yes and no. We work with both Walmart and DoorDash and the process is different for both, so the restaurant space would have to be discussed separately. Let’s say a Walmart customer in Frisco, Texas is having a July 4th barbecue and runs out of barbecue sauce or limes. For Walmart customers, they can order either through the Wing application, which they can download, or through Walmart's digital platforms, mobile web or app. All three platforms offer the same products and service, just with slightly different user experiences.

There are a couple of different business models too. When you are piloting with an organization like Walmart, they want to throw everything and the kitchen sink at the use case to see what sticks. In some cases, Wing associates pick-and-pack orders inside Walmart, walk them out in the tote where it has been packed, and hand that off to another Wing associate in the drone nest in the parking lot who loads the products onto the drones. In other cases, Walmart associates pick and pack orders and walk them out to Wing associates who will load the package onto the drone.

The future iteration as we scale and grow, which has been publicized, is something called the auto loader. This removes the associate from loading the drone—it's a standalone, non-electrical, simple piece of hardware that sits in the parking lot that the drone latches onto to pick up products. This alleviates the cost of having a Wing or Walmart associate being involved in loading the packages onto drones.

On the back end, all orders go through Walmart's POS system and that’s connected to delivery platforms via a straightforward API integration. It's in many ways a turnkey solution—if Walmart wants to start drone delivery at a new store, the back-end integration is straightforward. The main discussion would be about who handles the work picking-and-packing. Our approach has been to let Walmart do what they're good at—running these incredibly well-operated stores—while our business handles the drone delivery without impacting their operations, it’s just fulfillment versus a car delivery or purchasing in person.

What other industries and use cases do you see as natural customers or partners for drone delivery?

There’s a few no-brainers. We’re doing healthcare already and so are our competitors. It's just not as widely publicized. Healthcare is a big vertical. We're currently working with Apian in London, flying inter-hospital blood supplies, including for the NHS, and other hospital products. This replaces courier services that might cost a couple hundred dollars an hour with a solution that costs maybe $8-10 an hour per package instead of a couple of hundred dollars an hour.

Prescriptions are another "sneaky giant" opportunity that hasn't been conquered yet. Think about elderly couples who don't want to drive to pick up medications, or urgent prescriptions needed within 20 minutes. Walmart's pharmacy business is likely in the top five in the US, making this a huge opportunity.

Electronics is another area I'm personally excited about, and preaching it to our leadership team and our board. It’s high average order size items like AirPods, video games. There’s stuff you need quickly like printer cartridges, cables, or chargers. These are items people would otherwise order through Instacart or DoorDash from Best Buy, paying $15 in delivery fees and waiting an hour and a half. We know Walmart and Best Buy have these products in store, making this a unique use case beyond food, retail, and grocery. That would be the next stop.

What are other large tech companies like Amazon doing in this space?

The 10,000-pound elephant in the room is Amazon. They're delivering Amazon's packages, but they're not a last-mile logistics-as-a-service organization like we are. We're agnostic about whether we're delivering Walmart packages, DoorDash packages, or potentially Best Buy packages.

We view Amazon as a benefit to our business in many ways. The more visibility, FAA approval, and governmental/municipality approvals that Amazon gets will only help us and increase visibility for the space. Amazon offering Prime members package delivery in under 20-30 minutes is a unique use case.

Amazon has integrated drone delivery seamlessly into their user experience as simply another delivery method. If you live in their service areas in Arizona and order products eligible for drone delivery, they prominently promote this option because they want to provide the fastest delivery and best user experience.

Outside of Amazon, companies like Zipline and Flytrex are in the space. I think Zipline is on their second Walmart store in Dallas-Fort Worth. They have a very expensive, robust apparatus that they require to launch a store. It’s a big, big undertaking. Their technology is really great, they're a well-funded and strong organization, but I think their infrastructure means it’ll be challenging for them. We go in with 10, 15, or 16 drone pads, a container, and a fence in a parking lot, and it’s a heavy lift for us in terms of legalese, retailer, and municipal approvals. To put a monstrosity of an operation in a Walmart parking lot or a roof like Zipline is doing, I think will make it challenging for them to scale.

Flytrex has done pretty good work in the restaurant space. There are other smaller providers. But it’s really early days. We're working with more retail stores through Walmart and restaurants through DoorDash than anyone else in the country by a long shot. Despite this, there's a lot of room for growth. Looking around the space, you see a lot of companies talk about drone delivery in press releases and videos, but when push comes to shove it’s very few companies that are actually doing end-user consumer delivery in the United States.

Will the potential FAA rule changes in January 2026 on Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) flights be a big catalyst for your market?

We've been flying without human visual observers for over a year now, largely due to the FAA's comfort with our technology and track record, meaning we’ve been able to receive all the necessary waivers. We've delivered over half a million packages in the US without significant safety issues.

But I would challenge anyone who says these rule changes aren't a big deal. If you're delivering in what I call the "city burbs"—small circles around major metropolitan centers where people live in family homes, townhomes, or apartment communities—the ability to fly without visual observers is crucial. With visual observers, you might go one or two miles for delivery, whereas we can go up to five miles today because of our approvals, and that number will continue to grow.

Those approvals to fly beyond the range of visual observers are table-stakes at this point. Without this capability, organizations won't be able to scale.

So, if the FAA loosens BVLOS rules significantly, could small service providers partner with local restaurants, for example, and proliferate in the long tail of this market?

Yes and no. A mom-and-pop operator would still need to get their Part 135 commercial flight license and have the staff and technology for autonomous flying drones. You can get the state approval to do it in the sense that there’s a blanket approval in Texas, but you still need the specific technology approved for that. It's not like someone can just build or buy a drone and start flying it commercially. So, you need the FAA approval to fly that tech, and a Part 135 license to operate as an airline, plus approval from the municipality. You can't just fly drones commercially anywhere you want. If there are already a couple of providers in a market, municipalities are unlikely to approve more.

So there’s a pretty good moat around major metro and suburban areas: there's a limited number of approval licenses per ZIP code that the FAA and municipalities will grant.

Municipalities don't want seven different drone providers with 100 drones in the sky. When we meet with local officials, they express concerns about noise and how many drones will be flying at once. Remember the issues in New Jersey last year? There's substantial sensitivity around keeping drone operations from becoming chaotic.

Candidly, the FAA won't just green-light individual providers without proper safety measures. If you're a small drone provider wanting to run a pilot with pretty good technology, with one restaurant in an area like Spokane, Washington, two hours from Seattle, you might get approval for that specific site. But scaling beyond that would be very difficult for small organizations. They would be blocked very quickly, I think.

What technologies have pushed this market forward recently? What's possible or bleeding-edge today that wasn't possible a year or two ago?

One non-technical advancement is the adoption and acceptance from end users and partners like Walmart, DoorDash, and Amazon. Until about a year and a half ago, drone delivery was conceptual—like flying cars. When I joined Wing, I didn't believe it was a live delivery business; I thought it was just prototypes.

The acceptance, understanding, and lack of fear have made a major shift. Having customers experience placing an order and having it work simply has been transformative. When major companies like Walmart and Amazon put their weight behind drone delivery, it brings legitimacy.

When we enter a new market, we're not just branding Wing—we're promoting that drone delivery is safe, cool, helpful, environmentally friendly, inexpensive, and takes cars off the road. So that knowledge and understanding is one thing.

The other thing is that the FAA recently approved two drone providers operating simultaneously in the same airspace at all times, using layman terms. Previously, if we were operating in Frisco [Texas], Flytrex wouldn't be allowed to operate due to collision risks. As the technology scales and the networks of drone logistics begin to open up to communicate with each other, that changes things. We have a partnership with Flytrex in Texas where we're both allowed to fly in our competitive ZIP codes. Multiply that and begin to think about that. We don't view this as a competitive risk, we view that as beneficial for the industry—the more customers who experience drone delivery, the better. Whether it’s Wing, Amazon, or Flytrex etcetera

Other than having drones be able to fly outside the visual range of a human watching them, that’s been the other big step the FAA has been approving.

But this is what’s up next: the next big technological challenge to conquer is flying in bad weather and at night. Currently, the Wing drone is incredibly reliable, 99.9% perfect delivery, even if you ordered eggs, in what I would call moderate conditions, without revealing anything confidential—let’s say above freezing, below 100 degrees, with moderate wind and light rain. But when you think about how do you expand and scale this business? When does food and grocery delivery peak? It’s during bad weather, when it's cold, and on Sunday nights when it gets dark early at 5 p.m. Right now, neither Wing, Zipline, nor Amazon can fly at night or in adverse weather conditions.

This next level of technological advancement—optimistically months away, pessimistically years away—would unlock the next level of growth for the vertical by allowing drone delivery to compete more directly with robotic or human car delivery. I would say that would be the next huge step outside of these healthcare and retail opportunities that we’ve talked about already.

Could a retailer or other business just grab an off-the-shelf drone and put a system like this in place, or are special capabilities and purpose-built, bespoke hardware required?

It's less about the hardware and more about the software within the drone—the autonomy, mapping, and logistical intelligence that Wing, Flytrex, or Zipline drones have. An off-the-shelf drone, even a high—or mid-range drone, would require a human pilot and wouldn't have the logic built into it for live map tracking, communication with other drones, or automated landing baked into the technology. It’s a manual drone.

If a group of MIT engineers wanted to build a comparable drone, it might be possible with significant time and resources. Could that be done? Maybe. But you'd still need pilot licenses and FAA approval. We effectively have the foundation of an airline to support our drone network. Though our drones fly autonomously, they're monitored by FAA-licensed personnel. There are rigorous maintenance and upkeep standards. You can't just commercially buy a drone and start delivering packages.

Is cost what's driving your customers or partners to embrace drone delivery?

It's twofold. From a unit economics perspective, compared to a DoorDash driver, drones eliminate costs of recruitment, insurance, commissions, and the risk of no-shows. There are significant cost benefits for organizations like DoorDash or Walmart.

The second factor is the race to delivery speed. Customer expectations have shifted—it used to be that an hour for delivery was acceptable, but research shows customers now want sub-45 minutes, ideally sub-30 minutes.

The final piece is operational simplification. It's challenging to maintain a fleet of drivers or work with transient couriers. Walmart works with 16 different courier organizations, and the experience for customers is often terrible.

So while cost is absolutely a factor, the other intangibles—speed and operational simplicity—are arguably just as important.

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