GoKawiil
Tech News
DoorDash has launched a feature allowing customers to order meals by texting an AI agent inside Apple's Messages app, bypassing the DoorDash app entirely. The service is currently US-only and requires joining a waitlist to access it.
DoorDash announced a text-message ordering feature built on its Ask DoorDash chatbot, letting users request food and complete checkout entirely within a text thread. iOS users in the US can now join a waitlist for the beta, with no confirmed launch date or Android availability yet. The company also revealed northern California as the first test site for its DoorDash Air drone delivery service, working with Chipotle and Popeyes, and said it will expand its paid retail-returns service nationwide in November.
Atomic, a Boston-based startup founded by former Tesla employees, closed a $12.5 million Series A round led by Klass Capital and Madrona Venture Group, bringing total funding to over $15 million. The company builds AI software that simulates inventory scenarios and recommends or automates supply chain decisions, with customers including DoorDash and HelloFresh. Atomic also named longtime Tesla planning director Jeff Goodrich as CTO and third co-founder.
A pair of executive coaches who have worked with leaders at companies including Apple, Nike, eBay, Hewlett Packard and General Motors, as well as startups like DoorDash, MasterClass, Fivetran and Remitly, describe seven habits they say allow managers to demand excellence from teams without behaving abusively. The piece frames these habits as lessons drawn from coaching ambitious founders and CEOs across established firms and unicorn startups.
Lowe's has launched a drone delivery pilot at a store in Matthews, North Carolina, in partnership with DoorDash and Alphabet's Wing. The service offers over 100 products with delivery in as fast as 20 minutes, carrying orders up to about 2.5 pounds within a 5-mile radius, ordered through the DoorDash app.
DoorDash spent roughly $1.4 million during the 2025 New York mayoral race opposing Zohran Mamdani and backing Andrew Cuomo, including a $1 million donation to the anti-Mamdani super PAC Fix the City. Mamdani won and his administration this week announced a $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash over underpayment of 264,000 delivery workers, the largest worker settlement in city history.
New York City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection reached a settlement requiring DoorDash to pay $131.5 million after an investigation into late, missing, or miscalculated payments to delivery workers. More than 260,000 workers will share over $115 million, with the remainder covering civil penalties and disputed pay for time Dashers spent online awaiting deliveries.
DoorDash has settled with New York City after an investigation found delivery workers were underpaid or paid late. Under the agreement, more than 260,000 workers will receive over $115 million, part of a broader $131.5 million settlement with the city.
DoorDash announced it will now deliver from every Costco warehouse in the US starting Thursday, requiring customers to link an existing Costco membership in the app. The move follows Uber Eats' announcement a day earlier that it's expanding Costco delivery from 17 states to all 47 it serves.
Transforma Insights projects the number of automated urban delivery vehicles will jump from 28,000 in 2025 to 559,000 by 2035. The forecasted growth raises concerns about gig worker displacement at companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash, even as current robots' roughly two-mile range keeps human drivers necessary for now. Meanwhile, weak oversight—including over 20 states classifying these devices as pedestrians—is prompting cities such as Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto to impose restrictions or bans.
DoorDash is putting $425 million into Marc Lore's food tech company Wonder, split between a $300 million purchase of Wonder's Grubhub Campus Dining business and a $125 million addition to Wonder's Series D funding round. Wonder, a ghost-kitchen chain that lets customers order from multiple restaurant brands under one roof, has been rapidly expanding, now operating 157 locations after quadrupling its footprint since early 2025. DoorDash plans to grow the acquired campus dining service, currently active at 450 schools, into stadiums, hotels and other venues.
A speculative forecast titled 'AI 2027' traces a fictional lab called OpenBrain through 2025 and beyond, describing how early stumbling AI 'personal assistant' agents evolve into far more capable coding and research agents that act like employees rather than tools. The scenario shows compute for training jumping from GPT-3 and GPT-4 levels to an imagined Agent-1 system built on datacenters larger than any built before.