Matternet Brand Guidelines: Swiss Hospital Routes, UPS and an FAA Type Certificate

An internet for physical things.

Matternet says it was founded in December 2011 with a mission to make the delivery of goods “frictionless and universal.” Its founder and chief executive is Andreas Raptopoulos, who, the company says, presented the idea at Google’s Solve for X forum in 2013 by comparing it to the internet: a “Matternet” that could move physical objects the way data moves. He gave a TED Global talk on the theme in 2014.

The company’s first trials were humanitarian. Matternet says it tested an off-the-shelf drone in Haiti in 2013, and in 2015 deployed its first purpose-built aircraft, the M0, in pilots with the World Health Organization and the government of Bhutan and with Médecins Sans Frontières in Papua New Guinea. STAT Times, summarising the company’s own account in May 2026, dates its humanitarian missions from 2014, its healthcare operations in Europe from 2017 and those in the United States from 2019.

The M1 followed in 2016. The company calls it the first purpose-built civilian delivery drone system and says it is held in the permanent collections of the Design Museum in London and the Swiss Museum of Transport. The M2, unveiled in 2017, was designed to swap batteries and payloads automatically at Matternet’s landing stations. That year Mercedes-Benz showed its Vision Van concept with two M2 drones on the roof, the company says, and New Atlas recalled the Mercedes van trials in 2022.

Swiss hospitals, UPS and the FAA.

Switzerland became Matternet’s proving ground. With Swiss Post it began flying laboratory samples for the EOC hospital group in Lugano and later for hospitals in Zurich. The company says the Lugano route, authorised by the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation, was the first commercial drone delivery operation over a city flown beyond the operator’s line of sight.

The Swiss flights were interrupted in 2019. TechCrunch reported in July 2019 that one drone had come down in January after a GPS hardware fault and deployed its parachute, and that in May another came down in a wooded area of Zurich after its parachute cord was severed; Swiss Post and Matternet grounded the fleet. After an expert review, deliveries resumed in January 2020, starting with the Lugano route, Swissinfo reported on 25 January 2020. The experts made four recommendations, which Swiss Post said it and Matternet had already begun to put in place.

In the United States, Matternet worked through UPS. New Atlas reported that UPS adopted the M2 in 2019 to carry medical supplies in North Carolina, operating under a Part 135 certification. In September 2022 the FAA issued the M2 a type certificate, which New Atlas described as the first for a non-military drone, after four years of evaluation; the company says a production certificate followed. DroneLife reported in September 2026 that Matternet’s Part 135 flights run through UPS Flight Forward, Ameriflight and Beeline UAS.

By its own account, the company’s other routes include a city-wide medical network in Abu Dhabi, commercial deliveries in Tokyo authorised by Japan’s civil aviation bureau, and a laboratory route in Berlin for Labor Berlin approved by the German aviation authority.

Drones as delivery networks.

Commercial drone makers sell instruments, not toys, and their pictures show it. The aircraft usually appear in the field rather than in a studio: a fixed-wing or vertical take-off airframe, often in white with a bright orange or another high-visibility colour, standing on gravel at a quarry edge, on a farm track or beside a pipeline before launch. The landscape matters as much as the machine, because the product being sold is the map, the model or the measurement that comes back.

Inspection and delivery makers have their own set pieces. Caged inspection drones are photographed inside boiler rooms, tanks, sewers and mines, lit only by their own lamps, with the protective frame as the defining shape. Delivery companies show a parcel being lowered on a line or dropped by a small parachute into a garden, a hospital yard or a field, so that the service, rather than the aircraft, carries the story.

People appear mainly as operators. A typical scene is a field crew in high-visibility clothing holding a tablet or a ground station, planning a flight or checking images on screen, with the drone small in the background. Brochures and websites follow the same order: the industry first, such as surveying, construction, mining, agriculture or public safety, then the workflow, then the hardware, with software screenshots and sample maps placed beside the aircraft.

Much of the industry still meets in person. Trade fairs such as Commercial UAV Expo and XPONENTIAL bring makers, software firms and operators to the same exhibition halls, where stands show airframes on plinths next to large screens of point clouds and orthophotos. In this guide we record what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A listed company with a new aircraft.

Matternet became a public company in 2026. In May it merged with Los Altos Ventures Corp., a shell company that took the name Matternet Inc., alongside a private placement, STAT Times reported on 29 May 2026. Its common stock began trading on the OTCQB Venture Market under the ticker MTTN in September, DroneLife reported on 22 September 2026. The company is based in Mountain View, California.

Its business has also moved closer to consumers. STAT Times says Matternet began delivering to homes in Silicon Valley in 2024, and the company has announced a pilot with the restaurant chain Dave’s Hot Chicken in Los Angeles and a partnership with SoftBank Robotics America. In the United Kingdom it began flying for the National Health Service in central London in April 2026 and added Great Ormond Street Hospital in October, the company says. On 28 September 2026 it unveiled the M3, which it describes as a next-generation platform for food, retail, healthcare and industrial deliveries.

The product line, as STAT Times lists it, is the M2 aircraft, the Matternet Station and the Matternet software platform. The company’s values page says it searches “for aesthetic, simple solutions,” a line that sits alongside its mission statement on the same page.

Ground equipment has been part of the system from early on. Matternet says it unveiled its first Landing Station in 2018, able to exchange payloads and batteries automatically, and a second generation in 2021. In 2018, the company says, it also ran a pilot in Zurich with Mercedes-Benz and the online marketplace Siroop in which delivery vans served as rolling drone hubs, and in 2021 it began flying prescription medicines from CVS to a large retirement community with UPS.

For a design guide, Matternet shows how a delivery-drone company can build its story around certification and hospital routes rather than consumer spectacle. Compare Zipline, the South San Francisco drone-delivery company that began in Rwanda, and Manna, another drone-delivery operator. For this guide we use graphite, a glacier grey and a deep teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Matternet’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.