Alphabet’s wing drones to start Silicon Valley deliveries this year

Alphabet Inc.’s drone delivery company Wing will begin delivering parcels to homes in the San Francisco Bay Area this year, marking its latest expansion in a small but fast-growing market.

Partnering with companies including Walmart Inc. and DoorDash Inc., Wing already offers drone delivery in North Carolina, Virginia and Australia, but this is the first time that consumers in the company’s home market will be able to try out the technology, the company said in a blog post Monday. Wing, which flies parcels attached to a white and yellow drone with many helicopter-like propellers, did not give a date for the launch or list specific cities.

Wing’s efforts are part of a growing campaign by popular consumer apps such as Grubhub and Uber Technologies Inc to deliver packages via drone, betting that shoppers and retailers will embrace the technology in the race for ever-faster service. The Federal Aviation Administration tightly regulates airspace, and the companies’ efforts remain limited in scale.

“Bringing drone delivery to the Bay Area is another step in Wing’s ambitious plan to turn drone delivery into a national logistics network,” the company said in the blog post.

Wing emerged from Alphabet’s moonshot lab, X, which captured the public imagination with its pledge to take novel approaches to some of society’s biggest problems. As Alphabet sharpens its focus on artificial intelligence to keep pace with rivals, the company has trimmed X’s budget and pushed many of the ventures to spin out as independent companies in recent years.