Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company, engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies; the other four are Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
United Parcel Service, Inc. (UPS) is an American multinational shipping & receiving and supply chain management company founded in 1907. Originally known as the American Messenger Company specializing in telegraphs, UPS has expanded to become a Fortune 500 company and one of the world's largest shipping couriers. UPS today is primarily known for its ground shipping services as well as the UPS Store, a retail chain which assists UPS shipments and provides tools for small businesses. UPS offers air shipping on an overnight or two-day basis and delivers to post office boxes through UPS Mail Innovations and UPS SurePost, two services that pass on packages to the United States Postal Service for last-mile delivery.
Package delivery or parcel delivery is the delivery of shipping containers, parcels, or high-value mail as single shipments. The service is provided by most postal systems, express mail, private courier companies, and less-than-truckload shipping carriers. Package delivery is different in each country, and how packages are delivered is closely connected with the cost for delivering to that country as well as population. In 2019, China, The United States, and Japan were the leaders in package delivery while Latvia, Macau, and Iceland were the bottom three. The population of the bottom three barely totals 2 million while the population of the top three tops totals more than 2 billion. Package delivery is an every day occurrence in the US while many other countries do not have this luxury.
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
AngelPad is an American seed-stage startup incubator, launched in September 2010 by Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas with six other former Google employees as mentors. AngelPad provides mentorship, seed money, and networking at two 10-week courses per year.
In supply chain management and transportation planning, the last mile or last kilometer is the last leg of a journey comprising the movement of passengers and goods from a transportation hub to a final destination. The concept of "last mile" was adopted from the telecommunications industry, which faced difficulty connecting individual homes to the main telecommunications network. Similarly, in supply chain management, last-mile describes the logistical challenges at the last phase of transportation getting people and packages from hubs to their final destinations.
Amazon Prime Air, or simply Prime Air, is a drone delivery service operated by Amazon. The service uses delivery drones to autonomously fly individual packages to customers, and launched in 2022. The service currently operates in two cities in the US, with plans to expand into the UK and Italy in 2024.
A delivery drone is a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to transport items such as packages, medicines, foods, postal mails, and other light goods. Large corporations like Amazon, DHL and FedEx have started to use drone delivery services. Drones were used effectively in the fight against COVID-19, delivering millions of vaccines and medical supplies across the globe. Drone deliveries are highly efficient, significantly speeding up delivery times and avoiding challenges traditional delivery vehicles may encounter. Given their life-saving potential use cases for medical supplies in particular have become the most widely-tested type of drone delivery, with trials and pilot projects in dozens of countries such as Australia, Canada, Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, the UK, the US among others.
Maplebear Inc., doing business as Instacart, is an American delivery company based in San Francisco that operates a grocery delivery and pick-up service in the United States and Canada accessible via a website and mobile app. It allows customers to order groceries from participating retailers with the shopping being done by a personal shopper. The company also provides alcohol delivery in states and provinces where it is allowed. It has partnerships with 1,400 retail banners comprising 80,000 stores. Since its founding, Instacart Marketplace has powered more than $100 billion of GTV and over 900 million orders with approximately 20 billion items ordered.
Michael Seibel is a partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He first joined Y Combinator in 2013, advising hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.
Amazon Prime is a paid subscription service of Amazon which is available in various countries and gives users access to additional services otherwise unavailable or available at a premium to other Amazon customers. Services include same, one- or two-day delivery of goods, and streaming music, video, e-books, gaming, and grocery shopping services. In April 2021, Amazon reported that Prime had 200 million subscribers worldwide.
Matthew Sweeny is an Australian-born American aviation and technology entrepreneur and inventor. He is the co-founder and CEO of Flirtey, a drone delivery service.
Nuro, Inc. is an American robotics company based in Mountain View, California. Founded by Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, Nuro develops autonomous delivery vehicles and is the first company to receive an autonomous exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Wing Aviation LLC, doing business as Wing, is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. that develops a drone delivery system and UTM systems. The company completed its first deliveries in 2014. The company has operations in Australia, the United States, Finland, and Ireland, with potential expansion to the United Kingdom planned. In July 2018, Project Wing graduated from Google X to become an independent Alphabet company. As of January 2019, Wing began delivering take-out food and beverages out of its test facility in Bonython, Australia, as part of a pilot program. In April 2019 Wing became the first drone delivery company to receive an Air operator's certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration to allow it to operate as an airline in the US. In the first quarter of 2022, the service made more than 50,000 deliveries.
Zipline International Inc. is an American company that designs, manufactures, and operates delivery drones. The company operates distribution centers in Rwanda, Ghana, Japan, the United States, Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, and Kenya. As of April 2024, its drones have made more than one million commercial deliveries and flown more than 70 million autonomous miles.
UPS Flight Forward Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of UPS focused on drone delivery. The company was formally launched in July 2019, and on October 1, 2019, became the first company to receive the Federal Aviation Administration's full Part 135 Standard certification, allowing the company to operate an unlimited remote-controlled drone delivery network in the United States.
Wingcopter GmbH is a German aerospace company that designs and manufactures unmanned eVTOL delivery drones capable of providing last-mile delivery as well as mapping, surveying, and inspection. Their flagship drone, Wingcopter 178 Heavy Lift (HL), set the Guinness world speed record for remote-controlled tilt-rotor aircraft in 2018, flying at an average speed of 240.6 km/h. To date, the company has partnered with commercial and humanitarian organizations to perform drone delivery of critical supplies in Africa, the South Pacific, Ireland, and Scotland. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wingcopter partnered with Thales, Skyports, and the NHS to provide beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) delivery of medical test samples and other supplies to a hospital on a remote Scottish island. The company has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as "2020 Technology Pioneer". The company is amongst ten other drone companies to be selected by FAA to participate in a type certification program for delivery drones.
Volansi is an American unmanned aerial vehicle logistics company. Founded in San Francisco, California in 2015, the company utilizes VTOL drones for commercial, medical and defense operations.
Dedrone Holdings is a US-based company which develops counter-drone and counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) technology.
