Zipline, the global leader in instant logistics, has celebrated five years in flight since its launch in Rwanda in 2016.
The company, which on average makes a delivery every four minutes, recently surpassed 200,000 commercial deliveries, the most of any unnamed aircraft system (UAS) company to date. This marks a significant acceleration over the last year, after Zipline spent its first four years building to 100,000 deliveries.
“We set out five years ago with a goal to come as close to teleportation as possible—a goal many people found crazy at the time,” said Keller Rinaudo, co-founder and CEO of Zipline.
“Since then, we’ve shown not just that automated, on-demand delivery can work, but also that it can transform systems like healthcare to make them more resilient—and we’re just getting started.”
Zipline first launched blood deliveries in Rwanda in October 2016, and has since built the first and only automated, on-demand delivery service to operate at multinational scale.
Its service offers a more sustainable alternative to traditional logistics systems, with one Zip producing about 30 times less CO2 emissions per mile than an average electric vehicle, according to Zipline estimates.
Today, the company delivers more than 200 different products, including supplies with complex storage and transportation requirements like cold chain products, has completed 37,000 emergency deliveries and transported more than four million doses of medical products, including 90,000 units of blood products and 3.5 million vaccine doses.
In recent months, the company has significantly expanded its footprint in Africa, signing new partnerships with the Cross River and Kaduna States in Nigeria and closing an agreement to double its presence in Ghana to be capable of serving 90% of the country’s population.
The company has also played an integral role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, launching the first and only national-scale UAS delivery for COVID-19 vaccines. To date, Zipline has delivered more than 170,000 doses across Ghana. The company has also partnered with Pfizer to develop and test an end-to-end delivery solution for cold chain products. All told, Zipline has delivered millions of products to nearly 2,000 healthcare facilities.
“Over the last five years, we’ve established an instant logistics infrastructure that is more practical, sustainable and scalable than anything that came before,” said Keenan Wyrobek, co-founder and CTO of Zipline.
“The 200,000 deliveries we’ve made over nearly 15 million miles of flight is a powerful testament to what we’ve built—and we are just getting started. I can’t wait to share what’s next.”
