DoorDash Labs, the R&D team that built its autonomous sidewalk delivery bot Dot, created the drone delivery service now called DoorDash Air. The same team also developed the underlying software, called the Autonomous Delivery Platform (ADP), to handle the coordination challenges in deliveries handled by humans, sidewalk delivery bots, and now drones. The company's systems-first strategy for its DoorDash Air business aligns with its strengths. DoorDash isn't a hardware company, but it is sitting on 13 years of user data from the merchant and customer sides of the business. (DoorDash has previously disclosed that more than 500,000 restaurants are on its delivery marketplace.) 'We didn't start with a drone and ask what would fit,' Harrison Shih, who heads up DoorDash Air, said in a statement. 'We started with what people order and how local businesses actually operate, then built the entire system from there.' DoorDash announced plans in July to launch the drone delivery business after...
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