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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Pipedream

Pipedream Raises $13M as It Looks to Build Underground Middle Mile Delivery Network

Underground delivery startup Pipedream Labs announced it has raised $13 million in funding. Company CEO Garrett McCurrach disclosed the funding, led by Starship Ventures, with participation from Cortado Ventures, Myelin Ventures, and others, in a post on LinkedIn.

The new capital infusion will primarily be utilized to enhance Pipedream’s “Instant Pickup” service and kick-start the construction of an ambitious middle-mile network in an as-yet-unnamed city. This network aims to facilitate quicker, more cost-effective urban deliveries.

What the company calls its Instant Pickup service is when it deploys its underground delivery technology at a grocery store, restaurant, or retail store. According to McCurrach, an Instant Pickup system enables a restaurant or grocery store to hand off an order to a customer in less than 15 seconds. The company says it has 100 preorders for Instant Pickup systems, a number which likely includes its Wendy’s pilot announced last year.

The company says it will also select a city to build its first large-scale middle-mile network installation. While McCurrach doesn’t say in which city they will first break ground, he did include a graphic of a map of the Phoenix metro area with a diagram outlining a “small middle mile network”

McCurrach: “This year, we will be selecting a city to build our first middle-mile network (a large-scale underground delivery network that makes current deliveries faster and cheaper in a city) and collaborating with local government and city officials to maximize the benefits of our low-cost, fast delivery system for all their citizens. Construction is set to begin this year, with plans to start utilizing the network by next spring.”

My guess is the company will likely find a lot more near-term traction for its Instant Pickup business, as extremely short-range delivery within a given plot of land is much easier to deploy than a city-wide installation. It also doesn’t hurt that the company’s push into curbside pickup and fast food drive-thrus comes at a time when grocery stores are growing their pickup business and quick service restaurants are reimagining how they handle drive-thru.

Talking Underground Delivery With Pipedream’s Garrett McCurrach

Food delivery through underground tubes?

Sounds crazy, but it’s already happening today, and Pipedream’s Garrett McCurrach thinks it just may be the future of delivery.

We catch up with Garrett just over a week after they announced their first pilot in the Atlanta suburbs, where they have built a system that delivers food and other items underground for nearly a mile.

During this podcast, we talk about how Garrett came up with the idea, what it was like to showcase the system to Jeff Bezos, how the company is working with fast-food restaurants to rethink drive-thru pickup, and what he sees for the future of underground delivery.

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just click play below.

 

Pipedream Launches First Underground Delivery Network in Atlanta

Forget drone delivery. The cool kids are taking it underground.

That’s at least the vision of Pipedream, a startup building a system to enable delivery through underground pipes. The company, which is based in Austin Texas, has announced the launch of its first underground delivery network in partnership with Peachtree Corners, a smart city development in the broader Metro Atlanta region.

The new system in Peachtree Corners stretches nearly a mile, linking the development’s shopping center to Curiosity Lab’s 25,000-square-foot innovation hub. The Curiosity Hub is part office park, part event center, and now the employees who work there can order food and select (read smaller) items from local restaurants and stores and have them delivered via Pipedream’s underground delivery robots via the tube network.

With the announcement, Pipeline has released a video showcasing its first deployed delivery network, and it’s pretty cool to watch. As you can see below, the system basically looks like a small underground train network where robots pull the payloads through the pipes to their end destination.

First Ever Underground Delivery

Spoon readers will remember that we’ve covered Pipeline in the past, most recently after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was spotted checking out a demo of Pipeline. At the time, Pipeline CEO mentioned that the company was targeting master-planned communities and was showing off an early system in the Atlanta area. Now, just six months later, their system has been launched in the Atlanta suburbs.

With the launch of the system, this looks to be what may be a first in terms of an actual automation-powered pipe delivery network, and now that it’s launched, it will be interesting to see if other master-planned communities embrace the idea. For its part, Pipeline is also working with brands to build out pilots for its underground delivery where it makes sense, such as with Wendy’s as a way to deliver food to drive-up customers.

Forget Sidewalk Robots or Drones. In the Future, Food Could Travel to Your Home in Underground Pipes

Why use a drone or sidewalk delivery robot to deliver packages when you can have them sent directly to your kitchen via a series of tubes?

No, I’m not referring to Ted Stevens’ imagining of the Internet or a plotline from a Steampunk novel, but one startup’s vision of an underground delivery network that would send packages hurling towards their end destination at speeds of up to 75 miles per hour.

That startup is Pipedream Labs, which has a plan to build an underground pipe network for near-instant delivery of physical goods. The idea, which is one of those that is so crazy you can’t figure out if it’s brilliant or stupid, works like this:

The Pipedream delivery system would be a citywide underground delivery network that utilizes pipes and electric-powered delivery pods to shuttle things around at high speeds. It’s essentially a Hyperloop for delivery, only instead of transporting people, it will bring you the latest Amazon package or hamburger from your favorite restaurant.

While the initial plan is to create a “middle mile” network for long-haul delivery across cities, the company’s CTO says they have a vision for eventually delivering products directly into consumers’ homes. He envisions a new kind of home appliance called the Home Portal which would enable “cheap, fast, and environmentally friendly delivery of groceries, food, and packages.”

The delivery infrastructure will be PVC piping, the same kind used by city utilities for plumbing or electrical systems. In fact, the company says they plan on making all infrastructure usable by utilities “if needed” or “in the event that PipeDream migrates to an alternative delivery method (Star Trek Transporter?) or ceases operations”.

Packages would be delivered “intra-district” to different parts of the city and would go to what the founder describes as delivery nodes.

The nodes will utilize delivery portals, vending machine like kiosks that would hand off goods to a customer or to a last-mile delivery person or robot. Portals hand off packages through a hatch and can cache up to 8 delivery pods at a time, allowing it – for a limited amount of time at least – to act like an Amazon storage locker.

Source: Pipedream Labs

Delivery pods are 10.8″ in diameter by 18″ in length and have a theoretical speed of over 110 miles per hour (but will likely move around at a speed of 60 to 75 miles per hour when in operation). They have two sections, a drive section (which includes the motor, electronics, and battery) and a removable cargo carrier section.

Pipedream envisions all sorts of products delivered via their pods, including food. According to the company, the internal capacity has room to carry 95% of grocery items and most any type of prepared food from a restaurant (except for pizza, which the company says they are working on).

The analyst in me looks at an idea like this and says there’s no way it would work. The cost of building out the network, the difficulty of navigating city bureaucracies to get a network deployed, not to mention the many technical challenges of creating an underground system and operating it all seem insurmountably difficult.

But as I think about a world where ever-more products are delivered to our homes, it doesn’t take long to realize we’ll need a variety of creative solutions beyond the status quo. Car delivery doesn’t make sense long-term for small packages, but we also don’t want to live in a dystopia with drone darkened skies or sidewalk robots congesting our walkways. Taking a portion of package delivery underground may make the most sense long term.

Of course, it will take a while before we ever know if Pipedream’s, um, dream comes true. The company has only raised $1.6 million in seed funding so far and would need to tap into utility loan funding to build a network of the size they envision.

But who knows? Maybe Elon Musk will embrace underground delivery the same way he’s helped push underground transportation forward and invest in the company, or a forward-looking city will work with Pipedream to fund an underground delivery network for stuff over the next decade.

Either way, an operating underground delivery network is an interesting new idea and one that might have a future in an increasingly e-commerce-driven world.