Alphabet-owned drone delivery firm Wing is expanding its partnership with Walmart to offer drone delivery from more than 100 stores across five new U.S. cities, signaling a significant step forward in commercializing autonomous aerial logistics.
Walmart and Wing announced that drone delivery service will launch in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. Wing will also continue to expand in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where the companies piloted their collaboration in 2023.
The announcement reflects Walmart’s growing investment in alternative last-mile delivery methods. “We’re pushing the boundaries of convenience to better serve our customers, making shopping faster and easier than ever before,” said Greg Cathey, senior vice president of Walmart’s U.S. Transformation and Innovation department, in a blog post.
For Wing, the expansion marks a shift from pilot testing to full-scale commercial deployment. “We’re decidedly out of the pilot and trial phase and into scaling up this business,” Wing CEO Adam Woodworth told TechCrunch. The company currently operates drone delivery from 18 Walmart Supercenters in Dallas-Fort Worth, and the latest rollout represents a nearly five-fold expansion.
Wing’s delivery strategy emphasizes automation, lightweight drones, and low operational costs. “We figured out how the expansion worked out and looked in DFW, and now we’re sort of copy-pasting that across more markets,” Woodworth said. The company aims to grow delivery capacity without significantly increasing staffing, by leveraging efficiencies gained from expanding its drone fleet and delivery zones.
While Woodworth did not disclose whether Wing is currently profitable, he emphasized that scaling operations while keeping resource growth flat is central to the company’s model. “The more places you can be operating, the more you can be flying, the more you can defray those costs,” he added.
Wing is also expanding in the food delivery space through its ongoing partnership with DoorDash. Since launching drone deliveries in Australia in 2022, the collaboration has extended into U.S. cities including Dallas-Fort Worth and, more recently, Charlotte.