A Flytrex drone lowers a delivery.
Flytrex
Flytrex, an Israeli drone delivery company working with Walmart and other partners, is working to bring purchases to customers immediately. The startup’s autonomous drones, which they make themselves, are capable of carrying six-pound deliveries up to three and a half miles.
The company’s founder and CEO, Yariv Bash, hypothesizes that the future of autonomous delivery will be as fragmented as the current logistics landscape. Today, companies that deliver take-out meals are different from companies that handle business parcels, which are in turn different from companies that ship containers between continents.
Bash makes a similar comparison to the future of autonomous delivery. “It won’t make sense to send a driverless mini-van to your house to deliver a pizza,” Bash says. Flytrex is betting that a distinct niche will develop for immediate, local deliveries, which will use different types of autonomous vehicles from services that move humans, or even companies that handle longer-range delivery.
“We love suburban shopping malls,” Bash explains. Unlike more remote distribution centers, shopping malls are typically embedded within residential communities, which means a large number of customers live within three and a half mile range of Flytrex’s drones.
Additionally, stores have staff that already handle individual online purchases. Flytrex’s model is to utilize existing in-store fulfillment processes and then complete delivery with a drone. Store associates can prepare a drone delivery order for pick-up, just like any other type of pick-up order. Then a Flytrex team member will take the order from the store to a drone outside the store.
A Flytrex drone prepares for takeoff.
Flytrex
The drone will fly the order to the customer’s house, hover, and lower the package to the customer on a wire.
Throughout the whole process, the customer never needs to think about Flytrex. They simply place an order through the store’s app or website, and select delivery by drone.
“Delivery has become ubiquitous,” Bash explains. “The goal is to make it even faster. The future is moving toward instant gratification, getting something delivered as soon as you order it.”
Flytrex has been working with several regulatory entities, including the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to set safety and operating standards for drone delivery.
“We’re a regulated company and we’re going to operate according to regulations,” Bash says about these efforts, which are now in their third year. “Everyone currently operating in this industry has a waiver and exemption from the relevant regulator and is working toward a permanent solution. We’re on the phone with FAA officials twice a week.”
Bash view regulatory frameworks as the major challenge facing the drone delivery industry. “The technology is 80% there,” Bash says. “The big issue now is sharing airspace safely, especially with general aviation vehicles that are allowed to fly at low altitudes, by line-of-sight. Delivery drones are too small for those pilots to see, in many cases.”
Flytrex has a 40-person team, located primarily in Israel, half-a-world away from their customers in the United States and Iceland. “The main challenge now is the timezone offset,” Bash confides. “Since COVID, everyone has moved online, and it’s become normal to communicate by video conference, even if we were located in the same city.”
The startup has raised $20 million in venture capital funding, which is modest by Silicon Valley standards but has propelled the company’s growth in Israel, where costs are lower.
Compared to human couriers, who average between two to four deliveries per hour, Flytrex drones can perform up to 10 deliveries in the same amount of time. As the company expands and regulations come into place, Flytrex expects to complete deliveries at a rate of 10,000 per month by the end of 2021.
