Uber and Zipline announced a strategic partnership on Monday that could put autonomous drones in the US delivery mainstream: the companies are targeting one million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029, with the first Uber Eats drone drop-offs starting later this year in the Dallas-Fort Worth area before expanding to dozens of US cities.

Under the deal, Zipline's aircraft — which the company says already complete a delivery roughly every 20 seconds across four continents — will join Uber Eats as an autonomous fulfillment option, promising 5-to-10-minute drop-offs from restaurants and small businesses. Uber will also make a strategic investment in Zipline, the companies said, without disclosing the amount.

For Uber, the partnership is a bet that drone delivery can finally move from pilot programs to a meaningful share of the on-demand food market — and that the infrastructure built by Zipline, which began with medical deliveries in Africa and now operates across multiple countries, is mature enough to scale to American suburbs. For Zipline, it is a route into the largest food-delivery market in the world through an existing customer base of millions of Uber Eats users.

The announcement is the latest sign that the drone-delivery industry believes its regulatory and technological moment has arrived. Zipline and rival Wing have spent years winning approvals for beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations, and the Federal Aviation Administration's ongoing rulemaking on the subject is widely expected to define how quickly services like this can expand. The companies say the service will begin in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex — an area where Zipline already has infrastructure — later in 2026, with a phased rollout across the United States afterward.

The 2029 target of one million daily deliveries would represent a dramatic scale-up: no drone delivery operator currently comes close to that volume, and it would rival the daily order volumes of major food-delivery platforms. Whether the pace holds depends on regulatory approvals, weather, airspace integration and consumer appetite — but for the first time, the industry's largest players are publicly committing to numbers at that scale.

Sources