Walmart’s Drone Partners Are Acting Like the Experiment Is Over

Zipline, one of the two drone operators that fly deliveries for Walmart, has made a round of leadership hires that reads like a company preparing for industrial scale. CNBC reported Tuesday that Zipline hired Sendil Palani, a 17-year Tesla finance veteran, as chief financial officer; Kevin Vosen, who spent seven years as Waymo’s chief legal officer, in the same role; and former Uber Eats vice president Allen Penn as head of commercialization and markets. CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton told CNBC he expects Zipline’s U.S. business to grow 15 times this year, with expansion underway in Austin, Houston, and Cleveland and dozens of additional metros planned for 2027.

The resumes signal what phase this business has entered. Palani joined Tesla when it was building one car a day and watched it learn mass manufacturing. Vosen spent seven years navigating autonomy regulation at Alphabet’s self-driving venture. Penn built food delivery at Uber. Zipline has now completed more than 2.5 million commercial deliveries since its founding, a million of them in the past 12 months, and its South San Francisco factory can produce 24,000 drones a year, per CNBC.

That is the supplier side of a network Walmart has spent five years assembling. On May 29, Walmart announced it had passed one million drone deliveries, completed from 66 stores across four states serving five metro markets. The company says the average delivery takes 23 minutes, its fastest arrived in 4 minutes and 44 seconds, and more than 200,000 of the million landed in Texas.

Most of Walmart’s Million Deliveries Happened in the Past Year

The milestone matters less than the curve behind it. In its first full year of drone delivery, 2022, Walmart completed just over 6,000 deliveries from 36 stores, according to figures the company released at the time. By June 2025, the cumulative total had reached 150,000, per Walmart’s own announcement of its five-city expansion. Less than a year later, the count passed one million. Six weeks after that, Walmart told Reuters it was inching toward two million, with the large majority arriving this year. The overwhelming majority of the volume Walmart has ever flown arrived in the past year, which is what mainstreaming looks like in the data before it looks like anything on a rooftop.

Walmart Owns the Network Without Owning the Drones

Walmart got here by running partners, not fleets. The program began with 2020 pilots, including COVID-19 test kit deliveries with DroneUp and Quest Diagnostics and a Flytrex grocery trial in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In the fall of 2021, Zipline began flying from a tower behind the Neighborhood Market in Pea Ridge, a short drive from the home office. Walmart invested in DroneUp in June 2021, and by 2022 the retailer was flying from 36 stores across seven states with three operators. Wing, Alphabet’s drone division, joined as a fourth in 2023.

The operators at the center of the program today are Zipline and Wing, both holding the FAA permissions that allow flight beyond the operator’s line of sight. Both now fly in Dallas-Fort Worth, where Walmart says drone delivery reaches up to 75 percent of the metro population, which means Walmart’s partners compete against each other inside Walmart’s own footprint. Amazon has taken the opposite route, building its Prime Air aircraft in-house. The model amounts to a wager that specialist operators competing for the same retailer’s volume will scale faster than any single internal program, and the delivery curve above is the early evidence Walmart would point to.

The Rulebook Is Being Rewritten While the Network Scales

Every flight in that million-delivery total operated under exception paperwork. Flying a drone beyond the operator’s line of sight, the capability the entire delivery model depends on, currently requires case-by-case FAA waivers and exemptions, and the fact that Wing and Zipline hold those permissions is a large part of why Walmart’s specialist-partner model works. That structure is now being replaced. In August 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the FAA’s proposed Part 108 rule, which would establish a standardized framework for routine beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations and eliminate the individual waiver process, with package delivery among the use cases the agency named. The proposal followed a June 2025 executive order directing the FAA to publish a final rule within 240 days.

As of publication, the FAA has not issued a final rule. The proposal drew roughly 3,100 comments, and in late January the agency reopened the comment period on its right-of-way provisions, the rules governing how drones and manned aircraft yield to each other at low altitude. Zipline’s decision to hire a chief legal officer with seven years of Waymo autonomy regulation behind him reads differently against that backdrop. Suppliers should read the regulatory timeline, not the operators’ ambitions, as the gating factor on how fast the expansion map fills in.

The 2027 Map Is Already Drawn

In January, Wing and Walmart announced a plan to add 150 stores this year and build a network of more than 270 drone delivery locations by 2027, reaching over 40 million Americans from Los Angeles to Miami. In early June, the companies named the next seven metros: Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Salt Lake City, bringing the planned footprint to nearly 20 U.S. markets. Wing chief business officer Heather Rivera said the Walmart work has shown drone delivery is “a service many customers count on multiple times per week.”

Zipline’s side of the map runs through Austin, Houston, and Cleveland, with Rinaudo Cliffton telling CNBC that dozens of new metros and large international markets follow in 2027. Suppliers watching for where this channel arrives next no longer need to guess.

What Flies Is a 1P Story

Drone orders are picked from store inventory, which makes this a 1P, store-assortment channel. Marketplace sellers are outside this flow today, and nothing in the current announcements changes that. For 1P suppliers, the physics set the assortment: Zipline’s P2 platform carries up to 8 pounds within a 10-mile radius, per CNBC, and Wing’s aircraft lower packages by tether to a yard or driveway.

The demand profile is urgency, not stock-up. Announcing the January expansion, Greg Cathey, Walmart’s senior vice president of digital fulfillment transformation, said “the strong adoption we’ve seen confirms that this is the future of convenience,” pointing to last-minute dinner ingredients, phone chargers, and late-night essentials. Walmart’s earliest data told the same story: the top drone items in 2022 were ice cream, rotisserie chickens, and paper towels. For suppliers in the named metros, the operational questions are which items clear the weight and size thresholds, whether those items stay in stock at drone-hub stores, and how an urgency basket differs from the weekly trip the category plan was built around.

Researchers at PwC estimate the U.S. drone market will grow 65 percent a year from 2024 to 2034, with global drone deliveries rising from roughly 13 million this year to more than 800 million in 2034, per CNBC and Reuters. Rinaudo Cliffton put it more bluntly: “It’s at a crazy inflection point.” If that curve holds even loosely, the retail network positioned to absorb it is the one Walmart quietly assembled out of other companies’ aircraft, and this week one of those companies started staffing like it believes the forecast.

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