With the new funding, Zipline will continue to advance its integrated service, including its autonomy platform, aircraft, fulfillment systems, and operations, and to fuel its continued expansion into new industries and geographies, transforming systems like healthcare and commerce with instant logistics, and strengthen our support of local communities and the partners we work with. The new investors include Fidelity, Intercorp, Emerging Capital Partners and Reinvent Capital this round alongside the ongoing support from leading investors Baillie Gifford, Temasek, and Katalyst Ventures. The announcement comes on the heels of a year of tremendous effort at Zipline. The firm expanded its service hours in Rwanda to offer the first 24/7 autonomous delivery service in the world, signed a partnership with the Ministry of Health in Ghana to scale to four additional distribution centers that will cover 24 million people—90% of the country’s population and helped its partners in the US and in Africa respond quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic, distributing the COVID-19 vaccine and PPE in Ghana and transporting PPE in North Carolina with Novant Health. The firm also entered Japan through a first-of-its-kind strategic operational partnership with Toyota Group and announced a partnership with Walmart to bring on-demand delivery of health and wellness products to the U.S. Zipline also signed new partnerships with Nigeria’s Kaduna and Cross River States to deliver medical supplies, including vaccines, blood and medicines. Zipline also partnered with Pfizer to design and test an end-to-end delivery solution to safely, efficiently, and equitably deliver all COVID-19 vaccines in countries where Zipline operates and surpassed ten million autonomous miles flown, two million vaccine doses distributed and over 150,000 commercial deliveries completed. Zipline first launched in Rwanda in 2016 to serve 21 hospitals in the first year and it was hard for it to integrate systems, fine-tune hardware, onboard new facilities, pioneer new systems to integrate into civilian airspace. Five years later, the firm has created the world’s largest automated on-demand delivery service, pioneering a new category of instant logistics. Over that time, it has seen the transformative impact ofits service: from delivering COVID-19 vaccines at scale in Ghana, and becoming a foundational layer in that country’s medical supply chain, to launching 24/7 deliveries in Rwanda.
