Matternet Pilots Drone Delivery in Los Angeles With Dave’s Hot Chicken

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Matternet, the developer of the world’s leading urban drone delivery system, is partnering with Dave’s Hot Chicken to launch a drone delivery pilot, a first for the fast-casual leader. The service will debut in Northridge, a Los Angeles suburb, where eligible residents will be able to order Dave’s Hot Chicken through the Dave’s app and receive it directly to their homes via Matternet’s autonomous M2 drones — arriving hot, fresh, and fast.

“Each day, more than 10 million food deliveries move through our cities in 2-ton cars, adding traffic and pollution,” said Andreas Raptopoulos, Founder and CEO of Matternet. “Drones will replace millions of those trips — delivering meals faster, cleaner, and with no human contact beyond the restaurant and the customer. Our partnership with Dave's shows the future of food delivery.”

Orders will be prepared at Dave’s Northridge Reseda location and delivered to approved homes in Northridge. The partnership builds on Matternet’s successful home delivery service in Silicon Valley, which has been operating since October 2024.

“Innovation is part of our DNA at Dave’s Hot Chicken,” said Leon Davoyan, Chief Technology Officer of Dave’s Hot Chicken. “By using drones, we’re delivering our food in a way that takes it straight from the kitchen to our loyal customers’ hands.”

As the fastest-growing restaurant brand in the U.S., Dave’s Hot Chicken is redefining what’s possible in fast casual — now becoming one of the first national brands to test drone delivery.

For Matternet, this partnership marks another milestone in building the infrastructure for next-generation logistics, expanding from healthcare into food and retail to transform how goods move through cities.

About Matternet

Matternet is the leading developer of commercial drone delivery systems for urban and suburban environments. The company builds the Matternet M2 drone and Matternet Software Platform and operates its technology directly for customers or in partnership with logistics organizations, such as UPS. Matternet has achieved many industry firsts, including being the first company to be authorized for commercial Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone delivery operations over cities in Switzerland, the first to launch routine revenue-generating operations in the U.S., and the first to achieve standard Type Certification and Production Certification by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Matternet is partnered with UPS and Ameriflight, who have received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate the Matternet M2 under Part 135. Matternet launched the world’s first humanitarian drone delivery missions in 2014, the first B2B healthcare operations in Europe in 2017 and in the US in 2019, and the first drone delivery operations in Silicon Valley in 2024. To date, Matternet technology has enabled tens of thousands of commercial flights over dense urban and suburban environments in the U.S. and Europe.

For more information about Matternet, please visit: https://www.matternet.com/.

About Dave’s Hot Chicken

In a modern-day American dream story, three childhood friends, Chef Dave Kopushyan, Arman Oganesyan and Tommy Rubenyan, scraped together $900 to launch Dave's Hot Chicken in a parking lot, portable fryers and folding tables in tow, in 2017. Dave's Hot Chicken quickly took off, opening an East Hollywood brick-and-mortar restaurant shortly after, with support from Tommy's brother, Gary. In 2019, the team struck a deal with Wetzel's Pretzels co-founder and former CEO, Bill Phelps, and movie producer John Davis to begin franchising the Dave's Hot Chicken concept throughout the U.S. and beyond. The company has sold the rights to more than 1,020 franchise locations in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Canada and will open 70-plus locations this year. Harkening back to an Eater LA blog that helped propel early interest in the brand, the company's mission is to "blow their minds." Additional brand investors include Billboard Artists Drake and Usher, former California First Lady Maria Shriver, actor Samuel L. Jackson, and Good Morning America anchor and retired NFL player Michael Strahan.