On Monday, drone delivery company Matternet unveiled its new M3, the next generation of its autonomous drone delivery platform. The California-based company, the only one in the world with an FAA Type-Certificated drone delivery system, said its platform is built for delivery across food, retail, healthcare, and industrial logistics. 

This new release follows Matternet’s M2 drone platform, released in 2022. The M3, according to the company, is designed to let restaurants, retailers, or hospitals create a “dedicated delivery micro-hub” on their roof and send goods without an operator on site or anyone directly interacting with the aircraft. The sender simply needs to place the package – which can be in various types of bags or boxes, including those made specially for healthcare and industrial payloads – in the M3 Portal, and the system will autonomously take it from there.

“We started Matternet to build a new layer of transportation above our cities,” said Andreas Raptopoulos, Matternet’s founder and CEO, in a statement. “M2 proved it can be done safely for some of the most demanding use cases in the world. M3 is how we scale drone delivery into an infrastructure layer that anyone can access, and everyone can depend on.”

Three separate components comprise the M3 platform. The aircraft is an autonomous drone designed to carry packages weighing up to 11 pounds and can service a radius of up to 10 miles. The M3 Dock, meanwhile, stores and charges the aircraft between deliveries and can be installed either on a rooftop or at ground level. Finally, the M3 Portal is described as “low-cost” and “off-grid,” with senders being able to deposit multiple packages at once in the drop-box for asynchronous pickup. Matternet notes that the Portal is freestanding, simplifying installation and speeding deployment.

Along with this unveiling, Matternet announced that Dave’s Hot Chicken will be the M3’s initial launch partner in the U.S., building off a pilot program from last year. In the U.K., it announced Apian as its launch partner, with the two companies already operating a drone delivery network in Central London with the National Health Service. The company said it aims to begin M3 commercial services in the second half of 2027, along with plans to build manufacturing capacity for the M3 in the U.S.

This news follows the company's go-public reverse merger transaction, announced in May, which made Matternet the first pure-play drone delivery company on the public market. More recently, the company announced it is trading on the OTCQB Venture Market under the ticker symbol “MTTN”. 

“Drone delivery should be a utility: largely invisible, dependable and low-cost,” Raptopoulos said. “A restaurant, retailer or hospital should be able to connect to an autonomous delivery network the same way a building connects to water or power.”