DoorDash announced in July 2026 that it has received FAA Part 135 air carrier certification, allowing the company to legally operate a commercial drone delivery service in the United States. The new business, called DoorDash Air, was developed by DoorDash Labs, the company’s internal R&D team.
The certification does not mean drone deliveries are imminent. DoorDash did not provide a specific timeline for when its custom-built aircraft will enter active operations. Initial deployments will likely begin with limited pilot programs in which drones travel short distances while remaining within an operator’s line of sight. For autonomous long-distance flights, the company will need a separate FAA approval — Beyond Visual Line of Sight certification — which competitors including Amazon, Wing, and Zipline have already obtained.
DoorDash is maintaining its existing partnerships with Wing and Flytrex while building out its own drone capability. The company first partnered with Alphabet’s Wing in 2022 for drone delivery in Australia, later expanding to U.S. cities including Dallas-Fort Worth in 2024.
DoorDash Air sits alongside Dot, an autonomous sidewalk delivery robot DoorDash introduced in September 2025. Dot currently operates in the Phoenix-area suburbs of Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler, as well as in Fremont, California. Both programs are products of DoorDash Labs.
The company says the hardware is only part of the effort. DoorDash Labs has developed software called the Autonomous Delivery Platform, designed to coordinate deliveries across human drivers, sidewalk bots, and drones — determining in real time which mode is most appropriate for a given order.
Co-founder and chief product officer Stanley Tang framed the expansion as rooted in customer need rather than technology for its own sake. “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 announcing DoorDash Air.
Source: TechCrunch