Hospital Drone Delivery Deal for Matternet, TransLogic

Drone maker Matternet and TransLogic, a Swisslog Healthcare company that builds pneumatic tube systems for hospitals, have agreed to offer hospital drone delivery to TransLogic’s customers. In a joint release on 29 October, the companies said they would start with hospital systems in California, Florida and Arizona during the partnership’s first year. Matternet also announced the deal on X.

The idea is a single automated network: drones carry medication, lab specimens and urgent supplies between buildings, and the existing tube system moves them inside. Swisslog Healthcare’s transport systems operate in more than 2,300 hospitals in North America, the companies say, including 18 of the top 20 US hospitals.

In brief

TransLogic’s sales team will sell Matternet’s M3 drone system to its hospital customers, starting in California, Florida and Arizona.
The M3 carries up to 11 pounds within a 10-mile radius and is stored and charged in a rooftop dock.
Matternet’s earlier M2 drone is FAA type-certified; the release lists finishing the M3’s certification as a risk.

How the hospital drone delivery network would work

Hospitals today move small, urgent items in two separate ways, the release says. Swisslog Healthcare automates the inside of buildings with pneumatic tubes, pharmacy automation and specimen tracking. Movements between sites often rely on ground couriers, which the companies describe as costly and slow.

The partnership centres on Matternet’s next-generation M3 platform, which “carries packages up to 11 pounds within a 10-mile service radius and operates fully autonomously”. Between flights the aircraft sits in an M3 Dock that “can be installed on a hospital rooftop or other underutilized space”.

Andreas Raptopoulos, Matternet’s founder and chief executive, described the intended journey: “A lab specimen may be shipped from a remote clinic to a central lab by a drone and then travel by pneumatic tube inside a hospital to its destination.”

Cory Kwarta, chief executive of Swisslog Healthcare, said: “For years, hospitals have automated what happens inside their walls. This partnership extends that automation to everything outside them.”

What the deal covers

Under the agreement, TransLogic’s sales team “will serve as a distribution channel for M3 systems” into its customer base of more than 3,000 hospitals worldwide, including more than 2,300 in North America. The companies “will also explore” adding installation, support and maintenance, with Swisslog Healthcare’s field service organisation installing Matternet equipment at hospital sites. That part is not yet agreed.

The release names no hospital customers, gives no prices and sets no date for the first flights. Matternet, which trades on the OTCQB market as MTTN, says it has flown deliveries for health systems since 2017 in Europe and 2019 in the US. In London it already flies pathology samples from Great Ormond Street Hospital with the start-up Apian.

The M3 still has to clear certification

The drone at the centre of the deal is not the one with full FAA approval. Matternet’s release says its M2 platform “is the only drone delivery system to achieve standard Type Certification and Production Certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration”. It describes the M3 only as its “next-generation platform”.

In its forward-looking statements, the company lists among its risks “the Company’s ability to complete the development, testing and certification of M3”, meeting the M3’s “targeted specifications and performance”, and obtaining “site and local approvals for its ground infrastructure”. Rooftop docks at hospitals will need those local approvals as well as aviation sign-off. Local politics matters too: in Massachusetts, 16 state lawmakers asked for a pause on drone delivery permits.

That makes this a sales and distribution agreement, not a launch. Its value to Matternet is access: TransLogic already has relationships with the hospital logistics teams who would buy a drone network, and its tube stations are where a drone’s cargo would have to end up. For hospitals, the appeal is cutting the wait for courier vans between a central lab and outlying clinics, the same problem that drone trials for island lab samples in Uganda and defibrillator flights around Rouen are trying to solve. Whether it works at scale depends on the M3 being certified and on the first hospitals in the three states signing up. More medical drone stories are collected in TSN’s Tech for Good hub.