Matternet CEO Raptopoulos on Drone Delivery

So you've been working on drone delivery before it was cool.

What drew you to the space? Yeah,

I started Plotterant in 2011.

I noticed what was happening back then, the very sort of embryonic, like DIY drone delivery movement.

And I thought that this is going to change how the world works.

It's going to change how we do one of the most fundamental things that we do every day.

which is move things from A to B.

And so that really gave me the motivation to start the company and at the same time, you know, help build the industry.

So we're really the first people to start doing work in the humanitarian space using drones, working in very remote locations, places like Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, Malawi, with people like UNICEF and others without borders.

Then in 2015, we decided to focus on the urban suburban problem.

This is because we thought that this is where the vast majority of the market is going to be.

It turns out it's 80% of the market.

So we thought we should better figure out how to build technology for these spaces where the market is going to be at.

And then in 2019, we came here to the US starting to operate with UPS for healthcare systems.

It's a really exciting time in the industry right now because, you know, there is a massive inflection point that we're going through.

Very recently, the FAA has changed the rules or is changing the rules around fully autonomous log distance delivery.

And that's creating the conditions for exponential growth now in the industry here in the US.

And that's why it's so exciting.

So we get now to deploy this at scale for restaurants, for retailers, you know, in addition to very, I think, impactful applications in healthcare and other places in logistics.