Uber Invests in Zipline, Targets 1 Million Drone Deliveries a Day by 2029

Uber announced Monday it's investing in drone delivery company Zipline and partnering with it to start flying Uber Eats orders by air later this year. The companies didn't disclose how much money changed hands.

The pitch: get your burrito delivered by drone in 5 to 10 minutes. The target: one million drone deliveries a day by the end of 2029, according to a joint statement from the companies.

First stop is Dallas-Fort Worth, where Zipline already operates, and Houston, according to the Epoch Times and DroneLife. From there, Uber says it wants to expand into dozens more U.S. cities as Zipline builds out service.

Zipline isn't new at this. The company started in Rwanda in 2016 flying medical supplies to remote clinics, according to The Verge. It now operates on four continents, serves more than 5,000 hospitals, and claims a delivery every 20 seconds somewhere in its network. Zipline says it has completed more than 2.7 million deliveries of over 20 million items and flown 135 million autonomous miles.

Money is flowing into the company too. Zipline closed an $800 million Series H round recently, pushing its valuation to $7.6 billion, according to TechCrunch and Firstpost.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is betting big on speed. "Truly quick commerce is proving to be an even bigger market than the original food market was," he told The Wall Street Journal, per TechCrunch. "We think this can be an enormous tailwind for the next leg of growth for Eats."

Zipline co-founder Keller Cliffton went further, calling it "the next step toward building a world where getting what you need is as fast and effortless as sending a text, no matter where you are," according to a joint company statement carried by StockTitan.

Uber tried drone delivery once before through its Uber Elevate aviation unit starting in 2019, then sold it off the following year during COVID-era cost cutting, per the Epoch Times. It came back to the idea last year with a partnership and investment in Israeli startup Flytrex, and has a separate deal with Irish operator Manna in Europe. The strategy looks a lot like what Uber's done with robotaxis: sign up as many partners as possible instead of building the tech in-house. That approach let Uber stay in the game even after selling off its own autonomous vehicle unit, and even as its high-profile robotaxi partnership with Waymo is set to end when the contract expires in 2028, according to TechCrunch.

Competition is already ahead on the runway. DoorDash and Alphabet's Wing have been running drone deliveries since 2022, four years before Uber's Zipline deal, according to Gadget Review. By April 2026, that partnership had expanded to metro Atlanta, where customers near Locust Grove can already order food through a drone icon in the DoorDash app, with delivery in about 20 minutes.

DoorDash also received Federal Aviation Administration air carrier certification in July for its own drone program, DoorDash Air, clearing a regulatory hurdle Uber's rivals had to fight for, according to The Verge.

Grubhub parent company Wonder has its own Zipline partnership and plans to start Texas drone deliveries next year. Walmart has been expanding its Zipline network in Dallas-Fort Worth too.

Regulatory approval is essential. The FAA has proposed new rules to expand drone delivery operations following a 2025 executive order from President Trump, according to The Verge. That regulatory easing is a big reason drone operators are suddenly racing to lock down retail and grocery partnerships, chasing what one analysis estimated could be a $7.7 billion market by 2031.

But "Beyond Visual Line of Sight" approval, the FAA clearance that lets drones fly outside an operator's direct eyesight over longer distances, remains unresolved at scale, according to Gadget Review, which cited Reuters and Flying Magazine framing the 2029 goal as ambitious rather than guaranteed. Add in community noise complaints, weather limits, and the headache of managing dense urban airspace, and a one-million-a-day target four years out is a bet, not a lock.

There's a fair question buried in here for gig workers too. Neither Uber nor Zipline has said what happens to courier demand as drone volume scales up, a gap Gadget Review flagged as worth watching. If drones start eating into the lower-margin, short suburban runs that gig drivers currently pick up, that's fewer trips for humans, though nobody in this announcement has put a number on it.

For now, the deal is real, the investment is unspecified, and the timeline stretches to 2029. Whether regulators, cities, and neighbors let it get there is still an open question.