QuiQui: Your Pharmacy in the Sky

While Amazon is hard at work trying to figure out how to mass-deliver unicorn meat and buckets of live ladybugs by UAV, QuiQui (pronounced ‘quicky’) is already poised to launch delivery drones -and their payloads are lighter and more important.

QuiQui is working on delivering medicine via drone to the Mission District of San Francisco -and they say they can do it in 8-12 minutes.

“Just like ordering an Uber, you’re going to drop a pin and we send a drone right to you. When it gets to you, we send you a message and then you swipe to drop, its drops your order on you and it flies away,” QuiQui founder JOsh Ziering explained to Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal. 

QuiQui already has 600 people signed up for its service and is hoping to make its first delivery at the end of July.

Though, if they charge for their service, QuiQui will probably incur the wrath of the FAA and be told to cease and desist.

Ziering is unphased.

“I would describe myself as a troublemaker. We are going to cause as much trouble as possible until they [the FAA] are ready to make regulations and make this industry happen,” he said. “Whether we charge for them [and break the law] remains to be seen. As aviators ourselves, we want to abide by the law, but don’t want regulation to stifle innovation.”

As far as competition is concerned, Ziering recently told CNN QuiQui can move faster and with more flexibility than Amazon, “because we don’t have the accountability to the shareholders and stockholders.”

The biggest obstacle QuiQui will have to overcome, according to Ziering, is public perception.

“We are worried about public perception but we think [this technology] is coming either way. The biggest problem with this isn’t technology, its culture… We are trying to interface high tech with culture so, people aren’t going to be immediately ok with drones flying over them. They need to be assured our tech is the best and we are going to be doing this in a responsible manner.”