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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Underground Delivery

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.

Is Jeff Bezos Eyeing The Buildout of an Underground Delivery Network?

Today, Wendy’s announced they will trial an underground delivery system later this year in partnership with Pipedream Labs. According to the announcement, the system will deliver orders to customers via a carside pick-up portal using “autonomous robots” that traverse an underground pipe system.

Spoon readers might remember Pipedream Labs as the company with big plans to build an underground delivery network of pipes around cities to shuttle food or other items all the way to the home. The company is working with Wendy’s and other restaurants in the near term – you gotta pay the bills after all – but still has hopes to build the bigger vision of a citywide underground delivery network.

In fact, in a recent Twitter thread, Pipedream CTO Canon Reeves said the company is now courting master-planned community builders with a system that would deliver into the home.

According to Reeves, the Home Portal system would look something like this:

Pipedream Labs Home Portal. Photo: Canon Reeves

And the delivery robots look like this:

Pipedream Delivery Robot. Image Credit: Canon Reeves

Building these systems into new master-planned communities makes lots of sense for a couple of reasons, the first of which is retrofitting existing homes for underground to in-home delivery would be extremely hard and very expensive. Master-planned communities present greenfield build opportunities for concepts like this, where customers can be presented with the option as a feature in a new home, and the cost of the home system can be rolled into a mortgage. Home builders can also build out the delivery infrastructure as they lay down other infrastructure, either going underground or along the community right-of-way areas (as they did in Atlanta in a public right-of-way).

But even if the company just focuses on new build opportunities, the idea is still a little far-fetched, the kind of far-fetched where you almost need a utopia-curious billionaire who invests in crazy ideas to get behind something like this.

Someone like, I don’t know, Jeff Bezos:

Jeff Bezos watching a demo of Pipedream Labs Home Portal. Image Credit: Canon Reeves

According to Reeves, Bezos stopped by last month to check out the home delivery prototype. And while Reeves didn’t say anything beyond that – like Bezos is interested in investing in the system – one could speculate that the guy who founded the biggest online ordering marketplace in the US might just be curious about what a future with an underground delivery network might look like.

Could he be there on behalf of Amazon? Maybe. It’s not like Amazon doesn’t invest in delivery infrastructure, and, in fact, the company invested around $40 billion from 2014-2020 and continues to do so. And, let’s not forget, Amazon itself has explored the idea of underground delivery before and was granted a patent for the idea in 2017.

And even if this isn’t an Amazon thing, but a billionaire-investor-Jeff-Bezos-thing, Bezos has shown a penchant for investing in big ideas like space flight, and if Elon can build underground tunnels for shuttling people around in Teslas, Bezos would be entirely in his right to think sending items around underground in pipes might have a future.

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.