Walmart-backed DroneUp is cutting jobs as drone delivery market struggles

Published

3 years ago

May 16, 2023

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A delivery drone takes flight during a functional test at the DroneUp hub in the parking lot at the Walmart Supercenter in Clermont, Florida, United States on March 30, 2023. Walmart customers who live within one mile of the store can have certain items weighing up to 10 pounds delivered to their home by drone within 30 minutes for a $3.99 fee.

Paul Hennessy| Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

DroneUp, a Walmart-backed startup competing alongside Amazon and others in the nascent drone delivery market, is cutting jobs across the company, CNBC has learned.

The Virginia-based company began informing staffers of the layoffs Monday morning, according to two people who lost their jobs and asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Founded in 2016, DroneUp has a fleet of quadcopter-style drones that are designed to handle the last-mile portion of the delivery process, ferrying things like clothing, medication and food from warehouses to customers’ doorsteps.

The layoffs come as the tech industry continues to downsize and were part of the company’s decision to focus more on its delivery hubs, a network of facilities for on-demand orders in the U.S. DroneUp is moving away from enterprise services like construction and real estate monitoring, aerial data capturing, and marketing, the ex-employees said.

DroneUp confirmed the job cuts and the strategy change and said in an email that the layoffs hit “a small percentage of the team,” which now totals 418 people.

“After tremendous consumer adoption of our drone delivery services, we have made the decision to shift our business model to align our company structure around the continued growth and success of drone delivery and other drone services out of our Hubs,” DroneUp CEO Tom Walker told CNBC in a statement.

The company said that over the next six months, “we will hire more people than were laid off.”

DroneUp is one of several startups racing to make drone delivery a reality. Within the past three years, DroneUp, Zipline and Flytrex have signed multi-year partnerships with Walmart to deliver lightweight goods by drone in as little as 30 minutes. At least 36 Walmart stores in the U.S. have the service, the company said in January.

UPS, Amazon and Alphabet‘s Wing unit are also in various stages of developing their own drone delivery services.

Attempts at scaling commercial drone delivery in the U.S. have been slow moving, largely due to technical challenges and a lengthy regulatory approval process with the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency has authorized several companies to test drone deliveries in select markets as long as they don’t pose significant safety risks.

The economic downturn has also proven a setback for some drone delivery operators. Amazon in January laid off a significant number of employees from its Prime Air drone delivery unit just as the 10-year-old project prepared to begin flying packages to some customers in two small U.S. markets.

WATCH: Zipline releases new drone designed for rapid home deliveries

Technology

Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’

Published

3 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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$Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull'$

Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.

Figure AI

Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”

Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”

The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”

The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.

Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.

The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.

Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.

Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.

The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.

Read the filing here: