DoorDash unveils DoorDash Air, a homegrown drone delivery business

DoorDash is no longer just a delivery app that rents flights from drone partners. On Wednesday it formally unveiled DoorDash Air, an in-house drone delivery business built by its DoorDash Labs R&D team, after the unit secured a Part 135 air carrier certificate from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The cert, also covered by Business Insider and BNN Bloomberg, gives DoorDash the legal standing to operate a commercial drone service in the United States, the first public step in a vertical-integration play that the company has been building for years.

Part 135 is the FAA's standard certification for on-demand air carriers, the same regulatory lane that small charter operators and air-taxi startups have to clear before they can charge a customer for a flight. Holding it as a drone operator means DoorDash Air can be paid to carry packages on unmanned aircraft, run scheduled routes, and employ its own pilots-in-command rather than operating only under a research waiver. Amazon's Prime Air, Wing, and Zipline all hold the same cert. Part 135 turns drone delivery from a demo into a regulated business, with the operational and reporting obligations that go with it.

The R&D group behind the new unit, DoorDash Labs, is already shipping an autonomous ground vehicle: a 350-pound sidewalk delivery bot called Dot that the company introduced in September 2025 and that now runs in the Phoenix suburbs of Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler, as well as in Fremont, California. Adding aircraft to that team is less a pivot than a build-out. A single autonomy org now sits over both wheels and wings, and the FAA certificate is the first public regulatory tile in that stack.

DoorDash has not said when its custom-built drones will actually carry food. The company expects to start with limited pilot programs where unmanned aircraft travel short distances within an operator's line of sight. For longer autonomous flights, the kind that would make a drone delivery network work at urban scale, it still needs FAA approval of its Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) technology. Amazon, Wing, and Zipline have already received similar BVLOS approvals in recent years, which puts DoorDash's operational network still months, and possibly years, behind on the routes that matter.

Tang framed the announcement in a Wednesday blog post as a customer-problem-first effort rather than a tech-push, but rivals already hold the harder approval. Internal confirmation came from Max Rettig, head of DoorDash Air, in a post on X.

The in-house program does not replace DoorDash's existing drone partnerships. The company is maintaining its deals with Wing, which is owned by Alphabet, and Flytrex. The Wing relationship started in Australia in 2022 and expanded to U.S. cities including Dallas-Fort Worth in 2024, and the Flytrex partnership covers a separate set of suburban pilots. DoorDash is choosing, at least for now, to own the unit and the aircraft while keeping third-party capacity on the bench.

The FAA certificate today is permission to operate, not a launch date. The next test is whether DoorDash can file and win a BVLOS approval that lets DoorDash Air fly the routes where its competitors already do. Without BVLOS, DoorDash Air is the second tile in a longer regulatory ladder.