One of the founders of Amazon’s drone delivery project quietly left the company and moved to New York

LinkedIn/Daniel Buchmueller

Daniel Buchmueller, the cofounder of Amazon Prime Air.

It’s no secret that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wants to deliver packages and parcels using drones in the future.

What has been a secret, however, is that the man who conceived the ambitious idea for sub-30 minute aerial Amazon deliveries quietly left the company towards the end of last year.

Daniel Buchmueller, the cofounder of Amazon Prime Air, left Amazon’s Cambridge office in October 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile, to join Flatiron Health in New York the following month.

It’s unclear why Buchmueller left the ecommerce giant at this stage and Amazon is yet to respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

Buchmueller joined Amazon at its headquarters in Seattle in January 2013 as a software engineer. Prior to that, he was a captain in the Swiss Army for six years and a software engineer at Microsoft. He’d also set up his own business called Incotent, which helped mid-sized companies and large enterprises to adopt new technologies.

At Amazon, Buchmueller initially worked on an “undisclosed project” that may well have been the Amazon delivery drone. He officially cofounded Amazon Prime Air in October 2013 with Gur Kimchi.

Amazon

Amazon completed its first drone delivery last year.

On his LinkedIn profile, Buchmueller writes: “I started Amazon Prime Air: What started as an idea over coffee with Gur turned into a real, full-blown Amazon project. If you are passionate about UAVs, embedded programming, robotics, we should talk.”

Amazon promoted Buchmueller from a software engineer to an engineering manager in March 2014. During this time he headed up the “Fly” team at Amazon Prime Air, according to his LinkedIn.

In April 2015, Buchmueller left Seattle and moved to Cambridge — where Amazon is testing its delivery drones — to build up and lead the Amazon Prime Air UK team.

Rumours about Buchmueller’s departure have been circulating since last August but Buchmueller and Amazon stayed quiet when we contacted them.

If you have any more information about this story then please contact sshead@businessinsider.com.