DoorDash is building a drone delivery business, including its own aircraft, as part of an effort developed by its robotics and autonomy team, which will eventually operate within the company’s delivery app.
The company unveiled the new business, called DoorDash Air, after receiving a Part 135 air carrier certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The certification allows the company to legally operate a commercial drone delivery service in the United States.
This does not mean DoorDash’s custom-built drones will be delivering burritos tomorrow, or even next month. The company didn’t provide a detailed timeline for when its aircraft would be used in operations. But before they do, it will likely begin with limited pilot programs in which the unmanned aircraft will travel short distances while remaining within the line of sight of the operator.
If DoorDash wants its drones to fly autonomously over longer distances, it will need the FAA to approve its Beyond Visual Line of Sight technology, a certification that companies like Amazon, Wing and Zipline have received in recent years.
Despite the new program, the food and grocery delivery company is maintaining its existing partnerships with Wing and Flytrex. DoorDash partnered with Alphabet’s Wing in 2022 for a drone delivery program in Australia, later expanded the partnership to a couple of U.S. cities, including Dallas-Fort Worth, in 2024.
DoorDash Air was developed within DoorDash Labs, the R&D team behind Dot, the autonomous sidewalk delivery bot the company introduced in September 2025. The delivery bot is now operating in Phoenix suburbs of Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler as well as in Fremont, California.
The company’s foray into sidewalk bots and drones may seem well outside its core business model — an app that connects restaurants and customers with contractors who pick up food and deliver it to people’s doors. But DoorDash’s co-founder and chief product officer Stanley Tang said there is a common thread.
“We didn’t start with the question, “What’s the coolest autonomous tech we could make?” We started from first principles: What’s the actual customer problem that needs to be solved?” Tang wrote in a blog post on Wednesday announcing DoorDash Air.
In the company’s view, drones and sidewalk bots are part of the broader delivery network it is building.
The physical hardware — for instance, a 350-pound sidewalk bot or a drone — is important to this expanded view. But Tang argues that the operating system, particularly the software that can correctly determine what mode is used to deliver that burrito, sushi or pad thai, is just as critical.
DoorDash Labs has already developed software, called the Autonomous Delivery Platform, to handle the coordination challenge, according to Tang, and this operating system works with Dot, human delivery drivers and soon, the drone.
He noted that the company is tackling the full stack of challenges, from hardware and embedded systems to routing algorithms, and deciding in real-time whether human drivers, drones, or a sidewalk bot is the best option to dispatch a delivery.
This complexity was part of Tang’s recruitment pitch to engineering hires in the blog post.
“Most autonomy companies work on one layer. At DoorDash, you’re working on all of them simultaneously; nobody else is running all these systems on one network,” he wrote. “DoorDash is where the most interesting problems in autonomy are being solved today.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.