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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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AirSpace Link Landed $4M in Funding for its Drone Flightpath Clearance System

AirSpace Link, a Detroit-based startup that automates flight path and FAA clearance for commercial drones, raised $4 million in seed funding in the second half of last year, TechCrunch uncovered yesterday.

According to Crunchbase, AirSpace Link raised a $1 million pre-seed round in September led by 2048 Ventures, and a $3 million seed in December led by Indicator Ventures.

The easiest way to think about AirSpace Link is as a set of turn-by-turn directions for commercial drones. As delivery of packages and hamburgers becomes more of a reality , the sky above us will get more crowded. With AirSpace Link’s cloud-based software, a drone operator inputs their starting and delivery points. AirSpace Link then charts an aerial course and gets Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval in seconds so the drone doesn’t interfere with air traffic.

In a phone interview last month, AirSpace Link President and CEO Michael Healander told me that his was one of just five companies in the world that can authorize commercial drone flights near airports.

In addition to air traffic and obstacles, AirSpace Link goes one step further by working with local governments to consider ground-based risks as it charts the skies for a clear path. Working with local governments, AirSpace Link also navigates drones around things like schools, prisons and emergency situations you wouldn’t want a drone flying over.

Google, Amazon and Uber all have drone delivery ambitions. Google started trialing package delivery in Virginia last year and Uber Eats says it will conduct drone deliveries in San Diego this summer. As these services come to market, new sets of issues (like flight path creation) will arise. There will be a halo effect that spur the launch of more supporting startups like AirSpace Link.

Manna Raises Additional $3M in Funding for Drone Food Delivery in Ireland

Manna, an Irish drone delivery startup, announced today that it has added $3 million to its seed funding, led by Dynamo VC. This brings the total seed round raised by Manna to $5.2 million.

Manna plans to start with food deliveries in rural Ireland in March 2020, when it will work with restaurants and dark kitchens to deliver food across a two kilometer radius in as little as three minutes. Manna’s drones don’t fly higher than 500 ft and use a biodegradable linen string to lower food deliveries at their destinations. Manna has a partnership with food delivery service Flipdish, and will add on a fee of three to four euros for each delivery.

The skies are definitely getting more crowded, and 2020 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for drone delivery around the globe. Google has been testing drone delivery in Australia and recently started in here in the U.S. in Virginia. Uber Eats will officially kick off drone delivery in San Diego next summer. Amazon had promised its own drone delivery “within months,” though that was months ago at this point, so it’s safe to assume it’s been pushed into the new year. Fling is doing drone delivery in Thailand and, earlier this year, Zomato successfully tested its own drone program in India.

But drones still have quite a few hurdles to overcome before they become an everyday occurance. First, drones typically have a negative connotation with the general public, who can associate them with big, bad things like war and surveillance, or more minor inconveniences like the irritating buzz of a hobbyist flying them in a park.

Then there are the legal and safety issues surrounding fleets of drones flying overheard. There are startups like Airspace Link, which provides FAA clearance and flight paths to avoid ground risks, but federal, state and local governments are all grappling with how to regulate an entirely new category of commercial flight and all the complications that brings.

Manna founder Bobby Healy told The Irish Times that he thinks the Irish market will need up to 4,000 drones, with a drone doing five deliveries an hour. He estimates the UK market would need roughly 44,000 drones.

The Food Tech Shöw: Umlauts, Delivery Drones & Sweetgeen 3.0

After a mini-break following the Smart Kitchen Summit, The Spoon editors were back this week to record a brand new editor roundtable edition of the Food Tech Show.

Jenn Marston, Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb and myself jumped back on the mic to discuss the following stories:

As always, enjoy the podcast and please leave a review if you enjoy what you hear.

You can listen to the Food Tech Show by on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, by downloading direct to your device or just by clicking play below.

Uber Eats Reveals New Drone Design. Here’s How it Could Work With Uber Ghost Kitchens

Uber unveiled its new Uber Eats drone at the Forbes Under 30 Summit today. The company will use this design for actual food deliveries when it begins testing in San Diego next summer.

The new Uber Eats drone has six rotors that rotate, allowing the drone to take off vertically. Once the device is airborne, the rotors turn horizontally to enable faster flight. The drone can carry a payload of “dinner for two,” though it is not meant for direct dropoff at someone’s door. Since the drone only has a round trip range of 12 miles or 18 minutes of flight time, it will be used for the “middle mile” — transporting food from one facility to a staging area where a driver will pick up and make the final delivery.

Adding the driver may see like an extraneous step, but it actually makes more sense if you think about how Uber might use ghost kitchens. Ghost kitchens are shared commercial kitchen facilities that rent space to different restaurants wanting to expand their delivery operations. These virtual restaurants tend to be delivery only and only accessible to customers via app like Uber Eats.

Uber Eats reportedly opened up a ghost kitchen in Paris earlier this year, and just this month opened up a virtual restaurant with Food Network personality, Rachel Ray. It’s not hard to imagine Uber investing more in ghost kitchen spaces, using them to launch more exclusive restaurants that are only available via Uber, and literally topping the buildings off with some kind of drone launch facility on the roof. Centralizing a bunch of virtual restaurants in one launch hub would certainly make using the short haul drones more efficient.

Another advantage to creating a hub and spoke model for Uber drones would be limiting the complexity of dealing with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to create flight paths. Rather than having to chart different flight paths (and any accompanying obstacles or complications) on the fly for different homes, Uber could re-use a set number of flight paths to the same drop off points over and over.

Uber’s drone reveal comes after Google got FAA approval earlier this month to begin commercial drone delivery in Virginia. At the same time, Google’s Wing has partnered for deliveries for FedEx and Walgreens, and unlike Uber’s drones, Wing appears to be dropping off directly at a consumers house via a tether that lowers.

Regardless, there are still a ton of details that need to be worked out before drone delivery is an everyday thing. As I wrote about last week, when it comes to delivery, we are watching the world change in real time, and having to figure it out as we go.

Zomato Successfully Tests Drone Food Delivery in India

Indian food delivery service Zomato successfully tested its drone program this week, bringing the world one step closer to getting their dinners dropped off by air.

From the Zomato blog post announcing the test flight:

We met all our parameters and were able to cover a distance of 5kms, in about 10 minutes, with a peak speed of 80 kmph, carrying a payload of 5 kgs – using a hybrid drone – fusion of rotary wing and fixed wings on a single drone.

As Zomato points out, for a crowded city like Delhi, congested streets and sidewalks make fast food delivery near-impossible. Drones, on the other hand, can fly high above the masses of people and cars to zip across town and deliver a hot meal before it gets cold.

Zomato’s news came on the same day Uber Eats announced it was looking to fire up its drone delivery program this summer in San Diego, and a week after Amazon said it would begin commercial drone delivery within months. For its part, Google’s Wing division has already been testing drone delivery in Australia, and earlier this year got FAA approval do to commercial drone delivery in the U.S.

Zomato, like Uber Eats, isn’t focusing on drone delivery to your front door. Zomato said that instead it would create a launch facility near a cluster of restaurants, and then drop off at a hub near densely populated areas. From there, presumably either a person or a rover robot would make the last mile drop off to the customer. This hub and spoke model has the advantage of requiring fewer flight paths that need regulation/supervision. 

I’ll admit that I was initially skeptical about drone delivery. The rules and regulation around them are complex and still being worked out. Drones make lots of noise. And if a drone malfunctions, it can crash into buildings or worse, plummet from the sky and injure people.

But every company getting into the drone business is obviously aware of this and going to great lengths to publicly highlight their safety protocols. The Zomato blog post made a point of this as well, writing:

The final design of our drone is lightweight, and treats safety as a top priority. It has inbuilt sensors and an onboard computer to sense and avoid static and dynamic objects, overall making it more efficient for autonomous flights. Although being fully automated, each drone is currently being tested with (remote) pilot supervision to ensure 100% safety. Over time, as we have more data, we might not need remote pilot supervision.

If safety protocols and flight paths can be worked out, then drones do provide an efficient way for restaurants to make deliveries in big cities.

Uber Aims to Start Testing Drone Food Delivery in San Diego This Summer

We knew Uber was accelerating its drone program, and as of today, we have a few more clues as to just just how fast the company is going. Bloomberg got a first-hand look at Uber Elevate, the company’s drone division, and how it would work for food delivery. Though the test flight Bloomberg watched was a bust because of the weather, there was still a bunch we learned from the article.

Uber has been testing drone food delivery with McDonald’s in San Diego this year, developing flight paths and even working on new forms of packaging to keep food at the right temperatures. As of now Uber’s plan isn’t to fly a drone directly to your driveway. Instead, it will fly to a drop-off location where an Uber Eats driver in a car will pick it up and bring it the rest of the way. Eventually, Uber predicts it will land the drone on the top of parked Uber cars.

This may seem overly complicated, but Uber says a drone can travel 1.5 miles in 7 minutes versus 21 minutes by ground. So a drone could fly past city congestion to shave off delivery time, even with a pick-up car involved.

But that’s still a ways away for the company, which has not gotten FAA approval for commercial delivery yet. Uber told Bloomberg that it believes it is three years out from drone delivery happening in select markets.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of issues that Uber will need to work out. Inclement weather, for one, the danger posed by mid-air collisions into trees, wires or other drones for another, and also the noise (just ask the town of Canberra, Australia about the drone of drones).

Additionally, Uber is going to have to contend with fleets of other drones in the sky, all vying to bring you a burrito. Last week, Amazon unveiled it’s high-tech transforming delivery drone and said it would be making commercial deliveries “within months.” And earlier this year, Google’s Wing division got FAA approval to make drone deliveries.

Uber Elevate will evidently unveil a new drone of its own later this year that can reach speeds of 70 mph. The race to bring drone delivery to market is certainly speeding up.

Scoop: AirSpace Link Lets You Opt-in Your Address for Home Drone Delivery

While drone deliveries hold a ton of promise for tomorrow (burritos by air in just five minutes!), there are a ton of issues today that drone delivery needs to deal with. And a major hurdle for drone delivery will be the patchwork of state and local laws regulating where, when, and how many drones can fly in a given day.

AirSpace Link is a startup looking to help alleviate those and other administrative issues around drone delivery. The company came out of stealth mode today and launched its drone delivery registry, where people can register their dwelling or business as a location at which drone deliveries can be made.

There are actually four parts to AirSpace Link’s platform:

  • AirRegistry: Where people can opt-in or out of receiving drone deliveries at their home or place of business.
  • AirInspect: A service that handles all of the requisite city and state permitting for delivery companies in order to enable drone delivery.
  • AirNet: Working in conjunction with the FAA, AirNet creates a federally approved air route or “highway in the sky” for each drone delivery. These routes take into consideration things like schools and jails and other landmarks that must be avoided.
  • AirLink: An API that connects participating delivery services with the local governments and collects a fee that is paid to said local governments.

Now you should know that just because you register on AirSpace doesn’t mean that a drone will be dropping by your driveway any time soon. For now, the registry is a way to aggregate interest: Cities and companies alike can gauge how many people opt-in (or out) of drone delivery in various markets.  

Additionally, location registration must be completed manually (for now), with a person actually visiting a site to determine exact landing locations and make other assessments. Michael Healander, Co-Founder of AirSpace Link told me by phone that registry process will eventually be automated, and instead of a standalone site, opting in to drone delivery will be built into individual delivery apps.

Right now, local government rules around drone delivery are “all over the place,” according to Healander. To help cities get started with understanding and drafting drone delivery procedures, AirSpace Link offers a number of consulting packages for city and state governments ranging from $9,000 to $49,000. Eventually, AirSpace Link will also generate revenue through a SaaS model where fees are charged to the delivery companies.

Based in Detroit, MI, AirSpace Link incorporated in March of 2018 and soft-launched, running various tests with different government agencies and delivery companies throughout the past year. The company is founder funded, and Healander says they’re in the process of closing a round of venture funding right now.

Healander says the goal for AirSpace Link is to become a “neutral platform” that will connect any delivery service with any city and the federal government. The question will be how much control bigger companies like Amazon and UPS will want to give up in order to streamline future drone delivery operations.

Permits may be the less sexy side of drone delivery, but they are vital to its growth. Companies like Uber may be accelerating their drone delivery ambitions, but the fastest drones in the world can’t deliver your dinner if they are grounded by the government. Companies like AirSpace Link and AirMatrix, which provides similar air route mapping services, will be the bridge drones will fly over in order to bring you that burrito.

Burritos by Air Highlight Noisy Headaches Associated with Drone Delivery

There was a lot of chatter about drones this past year: Uber Eats is accelerating its drone ambitions, Zomato acquired a drone company in India, Amazon got a patent for in-flight drone recharging. There was so much activity that my colleague, Jenn Marston predicted that 2019 will be a big year for delivery by drones.

But as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, one Australian town is learning first-hand about the headaches that come with fast drone delivery. Wing, a division of Alphabet, has been testing out drone delivery in Canberra, Australia, flying everything from sunscreen to lattes through the air and depositing it safely at people’s homes.

Still in its infancy, drones have the potential to greatly speed up delivery of items like food, while using less energy and lowering costs. This is especially intriguing for low-margin, highly perishable items like food, which can lose freshness during long transit periods (see also: Soggy Food Sucks).

However, all that convenience comes at a noisy price. As The Journal reports, Wing’s drones have 12 rotors and two propellers making a chainsaw-like noise overheard. Multiply that noise by the number of people making orders and you have Canberra residents getting irritated by all that buzzing. The noise is wrecking calm and peaceful mornings, scaring dogs and keeping people from heading outside.

All this din is just one of the hurdles drone deliveries will need to overcome before they can become mainstream. Drones will also have issues with inclement weather and doing actual dropoffs in denser, urban areas where people don’t necessarily have a backyard. Then there is the whole issue of what regulations federal, state and local lawmakers pass that will ultimately determine where and how commercial delivery drones will be allowed to fly.

So far in Canberra there have been no accidents involving drone delivery. For its part, Wing says that it is changing up flight routes so drones don’t follow the same path each time, making the drones themselves quieter, and slowing them down to help appease residents.

2019 is going to be a key year for drone delivery, but it may wind up being the year we get through all the growing pains associated with the new technology. But like most innovations, get through it we shall, especially if there is the promise of Dro-nuts on the other side.

Uber Accelerating Its Drone Food Delivery Ambitions

Uber really wants to deliver your burger (or burrito, or whatever) by drone, and is accelerating its plans to make that happen. According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, Uber recently ran a job posting seeking a candidate who could get delivery drones up and running as early as next year, and commercially operational in numerous cities by 2021.

That job listing, titled “Flight Standards and Training,” has since been deleted, but it illustrates how serious Uber is about the food delivery space and its own ambitions within it.

The idea of drone delivery isn’t new, and Uber is among a number of companies including Alphabet (née Google) and Amazon looking to use drones for delivery. Amazon was recently issued a patent for in-flight recharging of drones, and even IBM has a patent for coffee delivery by drone based on your mood.

If successful, having its own fleet of drones could help push Uber’s food delivery business, Uber Eats, ahead of the pack in the fiercely competitive restaurant delivery sector. Uber Eats has been growing like a weed and is reportedly at a $6 billion sales run rate. But it faces competition from incumbents like GrubHub, which recently acquired Tapingo to snag college student customers, as well as upstarts like DoorDash, which has raised more than $780 million this year alone to expand its delivery operations (which probably will include drones).

Uber’s ambitions may run headlong into reality, however. Rules and regulations around drone deliveries still need to be worked out by the Federal Aviation Administration, as well as state and city governments. But as The Journal points out, Uber is eyeing a potential IPO next year that could value the company at $120 billion. Being early with drone deployment to boost its already successful Uber Eats division could help a positive narrative around its public offering.

And, of course, there is the question of whether people will want food delivered by drone, or towns will want fleets of drones constantly buzzing overhead.

Doritos By Drone? It Could Take A While

Across the skies in the U.S., delivery drones are a concept that holds great promise. This vision remains as an elusive scheme held hostage by regulators and uncertain implementations. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and even 7-Eleven are in the pilot and trial phases of drone delivery, as they test range, durability and payload of these flying, robotic carriers. A sign of domestic market uncertainty is that many of these early experiments are taking place on foreign soil.

Israeli-based startup FlyTrex is taking a different approach to the drone delivery opportunity. The company certainly has its eye on the food delivery down the road. While that space sorts out, FlyTrex is offering an out-of-the-box solution, complete with an API program, with potential appeal to markets beyond the culinary world with a focus on non-U.S. customers. Sensing the commercial use of drones for food and/or groceries is, at best, murky, the company has a deal in place with the Ukrainian postal authorities to soon test the delivery of small parcels via these unmanned, low-flying aircraft. FlyTrex hopes this is a first of many such trials.

While local governments in the US are moving quickly to pave the way for slow-moving (and safe) sidewalk delivery robots, delivery drones on the other hand are stuck in a frustrating loop of regulations that prevent the space from moving forward which, in turn, limits the technological progress of this mode of robotic delivery. As with many current legislative battles, regulating drones has become a fight between state and federal government.

“This could be a brave new world — and a cool way to get your stuff,” Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis told Governmental Technology. Lewis is a Republican recently introduced bipartisan legislation to give the state, local and tribal governments’ jurisdiction over drones flying at 200 feet or lower. Lewis believes such a measure protects privacy and property rights while giving a boost to new technology.

The FAA is not keen on turning over drone regulation to local authorities. “If one or two municipalities enacted ordinances regulating [drones] in the navigable airspace and a significant number of municipalities followed suit, fractionalized control of the navigable airspace could result,” the agency wrote in 2015.

Despite obvious roadblocks, Amazon is undaunted in its pursuit of drone delivery. Given the amount of money the company has invested in the opportunity, as well as its pending purchase of Whole Foods, the supergiant retailer must explore every channel for efficiently getting goods from business to business and from business to consumer. Recently, Amazon has set up a research center in Paris to develop an air-traffic control system for drones as well as seeking a patent for cylindrical delivery hubs that work for drones and delivery trucks.

While there are plenty of sample videos detailing tests in various regions of the U.S., or tantalizing futurists with drones delivering beer, it may be years before we reach the viable intersection of food delivery and octocopters. In the meantime, the current zeitgeist for drone delivery is one that requires patience, a strong vision, and the resources to wait out multi pronged inertia.