A Fishers, Indiana company that builds climate-controlled mailboxes for drones wants to start flying your dinner order straight to your doorstep, and it just found a drone maker willing to test that idea at its own headquarters. Arrive AI announced a strategic partnership with Modovolo to develop autonomous drone delivery, pairing Modovolo's modular Lift drone platform with Arrive AI's receiving stations and software.
According to ACCESS Newswire, the partnership combines Modovolo's modular payload pods, RTK localization, and long flight endurance with Arrive AI's Arrive Point stations and Arrive OS software. The companies say the combined system would let a drone fly autonomously to its destination and lower a package into a secure, climate-assisted Arrive Point without a ground pilot, a human in the loop, or a box left exposed on a porch. The plan is for that capability to eventually support deliveries of food, pharmacy orders, and retail goods.
Testing Begins at Arrive AI's Fishers Headquarters
The work will start with integration development, test-bed operations, personnel training, and real-world operation simulations, all based at Arrive AI's headquarters, per the release. That headquarters sits at a 30,000-square-foot facility at 9100 Fall View Drive in Fishers, which the company moved into in November 2025 after outgrowing its space at Launch Fishers, according to The Hamilton County Reporter. When Arrive AI moved in, engineers and designers were developing prototypes, while plans were underway for a live autonomous delivery demonstration showroom; the same report notes Arrive AI grew from six employees in early 2025 to roughly 60 by the end of the year.
Once testing succeeds and the companies clear the needed regulatory approvals, they plan to conduct live autonomous drone deliveries in a designated area of Fishers, letting customers order food for delivery by air directly into an Arrive Point. Arrive AI founder and CEO Dan O'Toole framed the technical challenge bluntly: “The hardest part of autonomous delivery isn't flying from point A to point B — it's precision delivery: getting a package into a secure, protected space without human intervention.” Modovolo co-founder and CEO Justin Call said his company is starting with a winch prototype to support package delivery into an Arrive Point, calling it “a critical step toward enabling fully autonomous logistics at scale.”
A Drone Built From 118 Parts
Modovolo, a U.S.-based drone manufacturer, builds its Lift platform around a standardized central payload bay with interchangeable mission payloads meant to support package delivery as well as military and public safety uses. The Lift platform is modular, and CenterState CEO reports on its flight hours, according to CenterState CEO.
Modovolo picked up a $500,000 investment in May as a finalist in Round Nine of New York State's GENIUS NY uncrewed systems accelerator, per Empire State Development. The agency describes GENIUS NY as one of the world's largest business accelerators dedicated to uncrewed systems and robotics, lending the upstate New York company some outside technological credibility as it builds out the delivery hardware side of this partnership.
Arrive AI's Roots and Its Bigger Vision
Arrive AI, which trades on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker ARAI, describes itself as a physical AI and autonomous logistics infrastructure company. The company went public through a direct listing in May 2025 after raising roughly $12 million through crowdfunding and securing $40 million in institutional financing commitments, according to IPOScoop. Before that, it operated privately as Dronedek Corporation, incorporated on April 30, 2020; O'Toole conceived the idea in 2014, per Wefunder. The company holds foundational 2017 utility patents for smart drone delivery receptacles that were reportedly filed just days ahead of similar filings by Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service, and it rebranded to Arrive AI in September 2024.
The Arrive AI platform is designed to work beyond drones alone, supporting ground robotics and human couriers as well, enabling secure, asynchronous exchange of goods. The company has described its focus as solving the last inch of the last-mile challenge across logistics, healthcare, and enterprise delivery. That framing includes healthcare, one of the areas the company says it is targeting.
Testing and Regulatory Hurdles Remain
The partnership remains in an integration and testing phase, with live drone deliveries planned only after testing succeeds and regulatory approvals are secured.
Regulatory approvals remain a hurdle before the planned Fishers deliveries can begin. Separately, during a September Investor Showcase at its Fishers headquarters, Arrive AI urged U.S. Representative Victoria Spartz to consider legislative initiatives establishing a U.S. Postal Service approval pathway and official federal address standards for autonomous delivery endpoints, as reported by Morningstar.
For this partnership, Fishers is the planned site of a designated-area live delivery test, contingent on successful testing and regulatory approvals.
