Zipline Celebrates 5 Years Of Drone Medical Service Delivery

Africa’s leading drone delivery service, Zipline, says it is celebrating five years in flight since its launch of blood deliveries in Rwanda in 2016.

Keller Rinaudo, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, said in a statement on Thursday that the company recently surpassed 200,000 commercial deliveries, averaging one delivery every four minutes.

According to him, this marks a significant acceleration over the last year, after Zipline spent its first four years making up to 100,000 deliveries.

“We set out five years ago to come as close to teleportation as possible—a goal many people found crazy at the time.

“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 are just getting started,” he said.

He said the company had 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.

According to him, in recent months, the company has significantly expanded its footprint in Africa, signing new partnerships with Cross River and the Kaduna States in Nigeria.

He said the company was closing an agreement to double its presence in Ghana to be capable of serving 90 per cent of the country’s population.

Rinaudo said the company had 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,” he said.

Keenan Wyrobek, co-founder and CTO of Zipline, said the company, over the last five years, established instant logistics infrastructure that was more practical, sustainable and scalable than anything that came before.

“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 is next,” he said.