Zipline

No single number decides. Layers can disagree — that's the point. New to this? →

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I wonder if you're looking at something like Harvey today, spending on the side of a building, if they have the right business, the right team, but maybe they blow through the capital and they're like, wow, we spent $10 million on advertising that we could have just put into the product and sales team.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Harvey, $15.5 billion valuation. And then listed Sequoia, blank, blank, and listed 20 VCs.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it was – we invested in Keller as, like, person-building robotics, and the first product was a toy.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  slow sales cycle. Like, the U.N. is not the best company.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  they had like a U.N. contract or something to deliver, like, medical aid in Africa, right?

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I'd seen it when they were doing the drops over – for medical and things like that and loved the technology of not having to land.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  By the way, we're early in Zipline, and I'm sure you saw last week national news that an Amazon drone dropped a package in a swimming pool. Yes. And it's like, you know, there are tens of thousands of deliveries happening every day now, and one package is dropped in a pool. And it's like, oh, my God. It's the end of the world.

• bullish assessment David Tisch

  ZipLine, which was, you know, two pivots later, a magical breakout company

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  However, they have a new version that's on the side of a Starbucks.

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  well, they have to go and they have to replicate the network of restaurants. That DoorDash has spent over a decade building those relationships and building that fabric. It's not impossible. Like, I think Zipline could be attaching themselves. They're building, essentially, the drive-thru window for drones.

• neutral fact_claim Alex

  So if you are Zipline and you want to compete with DoorDash, which I believe is their business models to compete with DoorDash,

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  plan this is critically important because you don't want to get injured with a quadcopter right there's rotors and they're big and they're noisy but if they can stay up 100 feet or 200 feet and drop a tether down put their fork it you know that's like somebody jumping in front of a delivery bike if you're dumb enough to do that you know it's your call but yeah this is going to be an incredible new future

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  this is from their Chipotle launch video it shows how they drop the package down Jason into the little catchment that you're describing yeah this is a company that has multiple approaches to the market and they're all crushing it and I just can't tell you how excited I

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  and I think it's such a great way to have a durable company and they went from doing fixed wing aircraft being slingshotted into the air they have these now you know backyard units forget about what they're attaching like the drive-through windows they're attaching to you know the Starbucks and Chipotes of the world but they have these sort of backyard bizarre looking netted out arrays I guess is what I would call them with their drones coming in not fixed wing but quadcopters or whatever and ma

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I just did interview with zipline the drone delivery company for for twist coming out to your podcast feed soon and they started off people kind of forget this doing medical deliveries in Africa and now we think of them as the oh they're the Chipotle delivery company oh they're the Walmart delivery company in Texas but they have several large business lines as well

• bullish endorsement Keller

  the company is growing really, really fast. We're hiring across engineering and operations. And, you know, if you want to work on something that is an insane adventure and that's building global infrastructure, that's going to save lives and save money for people and save time. You know, I do think that AI and robotics are going to remake the world over the next five years. And we have an opportunity to build universal high income and abundance for humanity if we get it right.

• bullish fact_claim Keller

  if you look at Platform 2 deliveries, which is the extraordinarily high growth part of Zipline today, I think that we've done more than half of all deliveries in the last 30 days. It really kind of gives you a sense for like, you know, it's, it's, that is what happens when you're on an exponential curve. We expect Platform 2, I mean, just to give a sense, I mean, Zipline is now doing more flights per day than United Airlines globally. And by the end of this year, we will be doing more flights th

• bullish prediction Keller

  Zipline is now accelerating. And so we are going to be launching new metros at an accelerating pace through this year. We'll be announcing more metros probably sometime in Q2. And we will get to the point where we're launching a lot of metros every quarter as quickly as we possibly can.

• bullish prediction Keller

  we are just basically in the first Q1 of 2026. So in the coming months, we're going to launch in Houston and in Phoenix. So those will be our second and third major metros in the US.

• neutral fact_claim Alex

  June 2022, Zipline Cited had done 325,000 deliveries by August of last year, 1.6 million plus. The most recent number is 2 million plus.

• bullish fact_claim Keller

  it is definitely a very capital intensive business. We are building this infrastructure out across, you know, every part of the U.S. and also across, you know, eight plus different countries all over the world. You got to go build ground infrastructure. You got to build service centers. You got to build the hardware. You got to build the factories. But we're really lucky to have a lot of the biggest investors in the world helping us, helping us build this infrastructure out.

• bullish assessment Keller

  these investors really believed in us. I mean, you know, some of the investors that participated in that round, you mentioned like Fidelity and Bailey Gifford and Capital and Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, many others. Like these investors have believed in us for a decade. And I think that I would say, you know, I and Zipline's board and all of these investors are suddenly looking at like these growth numbers and these, you know, the product market fit. And it's like it is suddenly very clear to

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  that'll actually expand us from about 5,000 hospitals and health facilities to over 20,000 globally. It massively expands that kind of autonomous network to more than 100 million people who don't have access to that kind of logistics today.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  It's quieter. The drone stays high in the air and brings down the droid. So you don't have a lot of sound and all that's lovely.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Zipline is six times quieter than the next closest competition, despite delivering a lot more payload.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  if you were to deliver 120, 130 million commercial autonomous miles in a car, you're going to have 600 crashes, over 100 injuries, and somewhere between two and six fatalities.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Zipline achieving more than 135 million commercial autonomous miles with zero safety incidents.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Zipline has now expanded to 5,000 hospitals and health facilities globally. It's become the largest commercial autonomous system on earth. It saves about 17,000 lives a year, predominantly moms and kids.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we are showing up, we're installing a magical portal in the wall of your building. ... And now anybody in that building, whether it's a hospital or a primary care facility or a Walmart or a restaurant, just walk directly to the wall, you know, put something in a box, pass it through the magical portal, and it's teleported directly to the home that it needs to go to in a way that is ultra fast, great for the environment and amazing customer experience.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  it's sort of like saying, oh, yeah, you know, if I were going to compete against UPS, all I need is a brown truck. You know, it's kind of obvious. Oh, actually, UPS is like a big, complicated logistics network. And same goes here. It's just that that logistics network needs to be fundamentally rethought, redesigned around autonomy. And so this is ultimately what Zipline's building. It's building an entirely new kind of logistics network with autonomy and AI and robotics at its core.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  it's made a lot more sense for Zipline to be fully vertically integrated so we can own every single part of the problem and make sure that every part of the solution is ultimately designed for this next generation way of delivering.

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  one of the biggest thing we understood is actually kind of like a profound realization was that the aircraft was about 15% of the complexity of the solution.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  It's amazing how quickly people go from like science fiction to completely normal, if not like entitled, you know, they're like, yeah, of course we have this.

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  most of these families are in Dallas because Dallas is where we did most of our scaling last year.

• bullish fact_claim David Friedberg

  I was visiting a grandma a few weeks ago who has ordered 350 times from Zipline in the last year.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  we're now delivering to public areas. So it's not just delivering to people's homes. Like you can be at a little league game and you can be like, oh, you know what? I want to get like cupcakes for the kids because we won. And people will just like place the order. And five minutes later, the product is being delivered to the GPS coordinates of your phone.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  we're using something we call a droid. So the main aircraft stays 100 meters in the air, 300 feet up, so football field. And then we're using a droid secondary robot that can control its position in X and Y axis to deliver hyper accurately to any GPS coordinates.

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Well, Platform 1, we've increased. Platform 1 today. Yeah. Platform 1, we now deliver, I think, over 6 pounds. Again, we always think in terms of kilograms. And then Platform 2, currently delivering about 6 pounds, will be delivering 8 pounds this year.

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Yeah, it actually delivers similar payloads, but the main advantage of Platform 1 is that it can fly 300 miles on a single battery charge.

• neutral fact_claim Alex

  Platform 1 is what you guys got started building, which is a longer range, lower weight, lower capacity drone that you've used across Africa to deliver medicines to great effect.

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  And we are now, you know, it is now a full manufacturing line. The vehicle you can see behind me is actually the next generation version of Platform 2, which is the technology that we use to deliver to suburban and urban neighborhoods.

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  I am standing on the manufacturing floor. In fact, we just quadrupled the size of this factory. We're located in South San Francisco. This building is capable of producing about 20,000 autonomous aircraft every year. It's the largest commercial autonomous aircraft factory in the United States.

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Zipline, you know, Zipline's a, yeah, a big, awesome team that's been working on this problem together for almost 12 years now.

• bearish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Then no one believed in us. We couldn't get investors to give us any money.

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  I don't think any of us thought we were building a really valuable company. But we felt like, hey, this would be such an epic thing to do. Like you can save lives, it would be so inspiring.

• bullish endorsement Keller Clifton

  You actually turned me down in our seed round. Huge mistake, huge, huge mistake.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Zipline has a large team of aerodynamicists and aeroacoustics experts who are totally focused on designing the entire power train to be as quiet as possible. And then the overall design, and that's like, you know, we design a propeller completely from scratch. We design a motor completely from scratch. We control the vehicle in very specific ways to reduce the amount of noise. And then we also keep the vehicle really far away. Like a football field away from your house when we're delivering to m

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Walmart as our biggest partner today, you know, there are about a hundred thousand SKUs in a Walmart super center. We deliver 80 to 90,000 of them.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Today we can deliver up to six and a half pounds. We'll be at 10 pounds by the end of this year. So that you can deliver basically like 95% of things that are people are ordering via quick commerce in this way.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  We've now added all these amazing partners like Walmart and Chipotle and Buffalo Wild Wings. We just launched Blaze Pizza. We're launching, you know, just last week we launched Quick Trip and Hawaiian Brothers. A bunch of amazing new brands. HEB is launching in the next couple weeks.

• bullish endorsement Keller Clifton

  getting logistics delivered by these robotic systems that are highly predictable and 100% safe is a really big advantage relative to, like, having a stranger come to your door when your 13-year-old daughter is, like, receiving a delivery late at night.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  There are certain municipalities in Dallas where more than 50% of homes are zipline customers. More than, it's like 50% market penetration.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  The service has a net promoter score of 95.

• bullish assessment Keller Clifton

  First of all, I kind of thought, oh yeah, it's probably gonna be all these nerdy, you know, guys who are really into technology completely wrong. All moms and grandmas, basically, who are using the service day in and day out.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  We can deliver with like dinner plate level accuracy. We're using this cute little robot called the droid. That's the thing you see raising and lowering. The droid controls its position in X and Y axis incredibly accurately. And so, you know, might seem like a crazy solution, but it's a really big advantage to keep the main aircraft very high. The aircraft is actually staying a football field up. It's 100 meters. And we're lowering the droid 100 meters to make a delivery. The droid is controllin

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  This Wendy's restaurant, by the way, zip line is now more than 50% of all deliveries from that Wendy's.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  This aircraft weighs, you know, 60 pounds. It hovers, but it can also fly in fixed wing flight. This is the infrastructure that we build next to our partners, like a Walmart. This is a Walmart infrastructure. You can see the zip undocking, taking off. It'll fly directly to one of our partners. In this case, it's a Wendy's.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Zipline got to this crazy scale. We're operating across eight countries. Zipline saves about 17,000 lives a year now. We've been able to reduce, you know, we talked about maternal mortality. We also dramatically reduced missed vaccinations for kids. We've reduced under five childhood mortality due to severe malnutrition by 85%. I mean, like the statistics go on and on. Turns out the experts were fucking wrong. A lot of big companies in the US basically started seeing this and started asking us t

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  It's meaningful and, you know, VCs, this is no dig to Alford, but, you know, there is a window in which you have to accomplish tasks and that gets superimposed upon every founder's company. And that window is typically 10 years, the life of a fund. And the fund can extend to 12 or 14, but at a certain point, they have LPs they're servicing, they're trying to service the founders as well, and you're on a 20-year timeline for what you're doing. Yeah. And it's, you know, Steve Jervison, when he did

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Zipline just crossed 130 million commercial autonomous miles. It's now the largest commercial autonomous system on earth. If you were to drive 130 million miles, you would have 600 accidents, 100 injuries, and two fatalities. That's like on average in the U.S. In Rwanda, the number would be way higher. And just to, you know, Zipline has done 130 million commercial autonomous miles, zero accidents, zero injuries, zero fatalities.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  We have individual aircraft that have flown more than a million miles in their lifetime, fully autonomously.

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  We basically guarantee in a hundred mile radius around the distribution center. So these vehicles can fly a hundred miles out, a hundred miles back.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  The crazy thing is this video was made about a year ago. We've doubled in scale in Rwanda over the last year.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  Every time one of those blue dots appears, that's like a life-saving emergency order that's being placed with Zipline. We can typically have a vehicle launch delivering to that site within two or three minutes.

• bullish fact_claim Keller Clifton

  We now deliver vaccines, cancer products, infusions, transfusions, everything.

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  The vehicle is only like 15% of the complexity of what we had to figure out.

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  You picked an ideal customer who was willing to take the risk because the payoff was so high. And that's really one of the great arts of entrepreneurship. You have to find a customer who needs your product and it's life and death. Now, when you're talking about a SaaS product or a marketplace, it's hyperbolic to say life or death. Yeah. But the stronger the need, the more they would be willing to bend the rules or take a chance. And you found the ultimate one, which was literal life or death. An

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  We went to the country that would give us regulatory permission as a 20-person startup that had no experience. That was Rwanda. We focused on a use case that was like the most important life-saving use case that we could imagine, which was delivering blood transfusions to moms with postpartum hemorrhaging. We, you know, they gave us 20 hospitals and told us to go for it. And that's what we did in 2016.

• bullish assessment Keller Clifton

  We had this simple idea, which was you should be able to build an automated logistics system that could serve all people equally. We felt like robotics would allow us to build a new kind of logistics system that could be ten times as fast, half the cost, zero emission. Logistics really only serves the golden billion people on earth well. So, you know, we can afford to pay DoorDash, like, $15. You're basically like private taxi for your burrito, private car for your burrito. But, you know, in rea

• neutral fact_claim Keller Clifton

  I started the company technically in 2011. We really started building everything that became Zipline in 2013.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  it's a commodity product alex it's commodity product like just like it's not people aren't buying drone delivery they're buying a hamburger or burrito they our customers do not care that they're getting to buy drone delivery anymore they're just buying a burrito so therefore your marginal cost of getting that product for the customer needs to be lower than the road-based equivalent or you're not winning and then once we're all there then it's going to be not a race to the bottom but you know war

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  relentless focus on cost and operation efficiency is what we'll win in this space it ain't cool or sexy or any of that stuff it's going to be absolutely obsession with unit cost and efficiency assuming that you have safety right

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we think like a low-cost airline we do not think like tesla or spacex or any of those guys we think like ryanair or southwest when they were good that's that's really what's going to be the winner in this business it's going to be low-cost airline mentality

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  one of our drones does 75 000 deliveries in its lifetime so it's the first thing the maintenance cycle is we're less than half a percent maintenance downtime per aircraft and that half a percent is what actually adds the cost because you've got a scale of maintenance organization so we've been using the same design aircraft for over five years so it's it's tested it's just simple as hell and it's a really low cost of ownership so 75 000 flights over to life means that it's just i mean the capita

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  our costs are a tenth of what it costs to do the same thing in the united states that's just labor cost so that all that advantage goes away when we scale operation in the usa but as i said you know having contribution positive economics even on low utilization means that you know we can be very very efficient with capital

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  capital has never been a bottleneck for us um you know we have never been ready to scale the business yet and our costs are a fraction of anyone else's so as we scale we'll actually generate cash so our locations the location we roll i would say 10 aircraft is contribution positive day one because we get a demand from aggregators and then it's so it's producing cash it pays itself off in somewhere between seven and 12 months depending on utilization so we will use desk for a lot of our growth an

• bullish prediction Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  we'll be adding a lot of people's favorite brands to the service very soon over the coming weeks

• bullish prediction Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  we're launching about one site a week by Q1 of next year we expect to accelerate to about one a day

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  we're now delivering to universities to offices to hotels to townhomes to apartment buildings

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  the first site that we launched in April it took us about two and a half months to get to 100 deliveries a day ... the site that we launched two weeks ago hit 100 deliveries a day in

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  we only launched Dallas which is kind of the major metro we're scaling in the US right now in April and by July ... we ended up turning off all the demand generation marketing because we were trying to slow down growth

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  customers are ordering 3-4 times per week from zipline the service has a net promoter score of 94

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  we started doing this focusing on healthcare ... we've seen these additional major verticals in food and retail we've been scaling incredibly fast with Walmart over the last six to nine months we just launched Chipotle

• bullish prediction Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  how what we started doing in 2016 is evolving into the next generation technology and launching in the US

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  when this was studied by a major global health institution for the cost effectiveness of delivering vaccine it was found to be the most cost effective way of delivering vaccines to zero dose children ever studied

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  the system has been able to reduce maternal mortality as measured by the University of Pennsylvania by a couple months ago actually showing a 60% reduction in under five childhood mortality due to malnutrition

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  it's actually become the largest commercial autonomous system on earth of any kind ground or air based on those flight miles

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  zip lines now surpass 115 million commercial autonomous miles we serve about 5,000 hospitals and health facilities globally over 1.6 million deliveries like that one you saw in that video and zero safety incidents

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  by 10 a.m there are 50 autonomous aircraft out making deliveries simultaneously to all of the 500 hospitals and health facilities that we serve in the country

• bullish fact_claim Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

  the system at this point can recover an aircraft about every 60 seconds and we operate about 20 distribution centers across eight countries

1. 2028-02-05 we are just basically in the first Q1 of 2026. So in the coming months, we're going to launch in Houston and in Phoenix. So those will be our second and third major metros in the US. · Prediction · confirmed
2. 2028-02-05 Zipline is now accelerating. And so we are going to be launching new metros at an accelerating pace through this year. We'll be announcing more metros probably sometime in Q2. And we will get to the point where we're launching a lot of metros every quarter as quickly as we possibly can. · Prediction · confirmed

VentureSignalScore 53/100 for zipline, composed from 1 of 4 components (index v0 cross-signal), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage