Zipline

Fortune Editors

Fortune's annual list dedicated to the idea that business is uniquely suited to address society’s biggest challenges.

CTW.1122.Zipline

More than 1,400 people have died of COVID-19 in Ghana, but the toll almost certainly would have been higher were it not for Zipline—a drone service that has delivered 1.6 million vaccine doses to hard-to-reach parts of that country. Zipline also operates distribution centers in four other African nations, Japan, and the U.S., delivering medical products as diverse as blood supplies, PPE, and antivenom.

Change the World

These venture- and private-equity-backed startups are tackling some of society’s biggest challenges—and having an impact that belies their size.

Impact 20-2020-Zipline

Shipping medicine around the world is relatively simple. But in regions where many communities are served only by unpaved roads, or by no roads at all, getting that medication along the “last mile” from the distribution hub to the patients who need it is the tough part. Drone-delivery service Zipline has put that last mile at the center of its mission. Since it began operations in in 2016, the California-based company has used its drones to make more than 60,000 deliveries to thousands of hospitals, primarily in Rwanda and Ghana.<br />
<br />
Each of Zipline's seven distribution centers can process 1,000 delivery flights a week and can serve an area of almost 8,000 square miles. The company designed its logistics chain to keep its drug deliveries chilled to sub-freezing temperatures—which means it will have capacity to distribute a COVID-19 vaccine, once one is approved. By cutting drug-delivery time from days to hours, Zipline's service undoubtedly saves lives. It also saves energy, since its battery-powered drones have much smaller carbon footprints than do gasoline-powered trucks. And Zipline drones may soon be a more common sight in U.S. airspace: In mid-September, the company announced a deal with Walmart to begin testing on-demand delivery of health and wellness products near the retail giant’s headquarters in Arkansas.

Impact 20

Change The World

Impact Segment

Sector

Zipline Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

zipline

Zipline Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Zipline, focused on using drone delivery to improve and expand healthcare access, was told it would never succeed. It's now the world's largest drone delivery system.

Leadership Next: Zipline CEO, Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

Leadership

Zipline is the world's largest drone delivery system.

We can all put, pretend we're drones. Alright. Sounds good. Welcome to leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Ellen mcgirt. We were told by every expert out there that we spoke to in global public health care that this wasn't going to work. But luckily this one Ministry of Health believed in zip line at that time. Since then, Zipline has expanded from 21 hospitals to about 400 hospitals and health facilities across Rwanda. We expanded from delivering just blood to all medical products. Now wide variety of other products on top of that. And then we expanded into seven more countries. So today Zip Line serves about 3400 hospitals and health facilities has become the largest commercial autonomous system on earth of any kind. And we're on track to be serving 10,000 hospitals and health facilities by the end of this year, just based on contracts that Zipline has already signed. The big vision here is to build the first logistics system that serves all people equally and to transition last mile logistics to zero emission. What we just announced is Ziplines has spent the last four years quietly building this next generation home deliver great technology. And there are a whole, whole bunch of different customers in the US. And in a lot of the African countries that we serve, who have already signed on to adopt this home delivery service and start delivering to millions of homes at scale both across healthcare, as well as other verticals. You know, in many cases, I don't know if I have anything super smart other than it's just about partnership, I was talking to President Kagame yesterday and I asked him, you know, we were a team of 15 nerds. Then why on earth did you make that bet on us? And he said, look, if it worked, it was gonna be totally transformational for the country. And if it didn't work, it wasn't that big of a deal. And he was like, I thought it probably wouldn't work, but it seemed worth trying. And, you know, that is actually a sort of revolutionary attitude for a government leader to take that's typically not how governments work. And, you know, I think over seven years that partnership has really blossomed. What I know for sure is we have got to get the smartest minds of, you know, of my generation of the next generation focused on these important mission driven humanity, scale problems. And there's a role for investors to play because if we start to show that you can actually build valuable technology companies serving these kinds of markets, solving these problems. Then capitalism is ultimately the driving force that's going to enable these solutions to scale and serve billions of people.

[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: Drones have brought big changes to entertainment, to sports, to real estate, even to pizza delivery. But one company wants to use its drones to save lives. Its mission is bold-- bring life-saving medicine to the most difficult to reach places on the planet. Zipline is the world's only drone delivery system operating at a national scale. In 2016, Zipline launched in Rwanda, Africa, where just 25% of roads are paved. Impassable mountains and washed-out roads are no match for the drones which deliver blood and medicine straight to remote clinics. Here's exactly how it works. First, health workers at clinics or hospitals text their orders to Zipline. The medical products stored at Zipline's distribution center are then prepared for flight. Health workers receive confirmation that their order has launched. In under 30 minutes, the medical products are delivered by parachute into a designated area. The Zipline drone then returns to home base. To date, zipline has delivered over 7,000 units of blood and taken over 10,000 flights. Approximately a third of those have been in emergency, life-saving situations. Zipline has since expanded to Tanzania. And it hopes to launch in the US, too. Zipline's long-term mission? To build instant delivery for the planet. In a world where billions of people lack adequate access to essential medical products, that can't happen quickly enough. [MUSIC PLAYING] 

Drones are able to deliver life-saving medicines in underserved areas. 

Insights: How Drone Startup ‘Zipline’ Is Saving Lives

Uncategorized

Drones can deliver medicines in underserved areas.

How Drone Startup ‘Zipline’ Is Saving Lives

Drones can deliver medicines in underserved areas. 

 Drones have brought big changes to entertainment, to sports, to real estate, even to pizza delivery. But one company wants to use its drones to save lives. Its mission is bold-- bring life saving medicine to the most difficult to reach places on the planet. Zipline is the world's only drone delivery system operating at a national scale. In 2016, Zipline launched in Rwanda, Africa, where just 25% of roads are paved. Impassable mountains and washed out roads are no match for the drones, which deliver blood and medicine straight to remote clinics. Here's exactly how it works. First, health workers at clinics or hospitals text their orders to Zipline. The medical products stored at Zipline's distribution center are then prepared for flight. Health workers receive confirmation that their order has launched. In under 30 minutes, the medical products are delivered by parachute into a designated area. The Zipline drone then returns to home base. To date, Zipline has delivered over 7,000 units of blood and taken over 10,000 flights. Approximately 1/3 of those have been an emergency life saving situations. Zipline has since expanded to Tanzania, and it hopes to launch in the US too. Zipline's long term mission? To build instant delivery for the planet. In a world where billions of people lack adequate access to essential medical products, that can't happen quickly enough. 

Drone Startup 'Zipline' Is Saving Lives

Design

drones have brought big changes entertainment to sports to real estate, even to pizza delivery. But one company wants to use its drones to save lives. It's mission is both bring life saving medicine to the most difficult to reach places on the planet. Tip line is the world's Onley drone delivery system, operating at a national scale in 2016 ZIP line launched in Rwanda. Africa, where just 25% of roads are paved, impassable mountains and wash out roads are no match for the drones, which deliver blood and medicine straight to remote clinics. Here's exactly how it works. First, health workers at clinics or hospitals text their orders to ZIP line. The medical products stored it depends distribution center are then prepared for flight. Health workers received confirmation that their order has launched in under 30 minutes. The medical products are delivered by parachute into a designated area zip line drone, then returns to home base. To date, ZIP Line has delivered over 7000 units of blood and taken over 10,000 flights. Approximately 1/3 of those have been in emergency lifesaving situations. Zip Line has since expanded to Tanzania, and it hopes the launch in the U. S. To ZIP Lines long term mission to build instant delivery for the planet In a world where billions of people like adequate access to essential medical products, that can't happen quickly enough.

give a quick summary of what's the plan does we build an instant Delivery Network for medical products. And we do that using small 40 pound electric autonomous aircraft like the one that you see here in this photo. And the reason this seemed like a really good thing to spend our lives doing is that healthcare logistics today really only serves the golden billion people on the planet well and. The other 6 billion are largely ignored and as a result of that of five and half million kids die due to lack of access to basic medical products. That just seemed like a crazy thing to be happening in this day and age. So whenever we talk about drone delivery I think people still think that it's largely science fiction. So, let me only talk about what we're actually doing today. This is a map of the country of Rwanda. Today, Zipline is delivering about 60 % of the national blood supply of Rwanda, outside of the capital. We're doing that from two districtribution centres which are the two Zs that you can see in this map, Zipline hires all over an operator an operates as distribution centres And the transfusions that we're delivering, % 50 of them are being used for moms with postpartum hemorrhaging. And then % 30 are being used for kids under the age of 5. So, this is a really, really important product, especially for family health. And today this is actually the largest commercial autonomous system anywhere on the planet. It's happening in Rwanda You can see all of the little blood icons on the map are the hospitals. Probably even harder to see are the little grey dots but that's about 500 primary care facilities that we've been adding to the network over the last couple of months. So would you like to see how it works? Ok. Cool. This is not fancy I took this video on my cell phone but this will give you a sense. This is a zip which is one of the vehicles Flying by one of the hospitals that we serve, we deliver from about ten meters up. And we can deliver into an air mailbox, quote unquote mailbox, which is about two parking spaces on the ground. And they can set that mailbox up wherever they want. We also take the wind into account. So even when it's really windy, a vehicle can deliver in a really precise way. You can see these women are like, what the hell did we just see. [ LAUGH ] All right, relatively shocked, but you'd be amazed by how quickly something goes from from science fiction to like totally normal, and of course we have drones that deliver all the urgent medical products we need. The really cool thing about this is Is that we now have two years of operating data operating at national scale, and typically healthcare logistics networks have to balance access against waste. If you want to deliver a lot of product to the last mile you end up throwing a lot out and vice versa if you keep more centralized, patients end up dying when they don't have access. But Rwanda has actually been able to show that you can reduce waste from 6 % to 0. They're the first country in the world to achieve that. And they did that while increasing access to blood products by about 172 %, so really, really cool. And obviously, even more important than that is the lives But this impacts, sip on it has been able to do nearly 4000 life saving emergency deliveries in last year [ UNKNOWN ], this is hours amount who is giving a birth one of those hospitals that we serve and we ending it up delivering six units of play list, sorry out. I think it was six units of red blood cells, and four units of platelets, and two units of plasma, all of which was transfused into her on an emergency basis, and the doctors were able to save her life. So let me just show you really, really quickly, let you actually hear from the people who are running this system, and the patients who benefited from it. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Zipline is [ UNKNOWN ] into the [ UNKNOWN ]. You have to fly [ UNKNOWN ] or care about [ UNKNOWN ] planes and [ UNKNOWN ] packages and make sure the plane can fly. Then we have [ UNKNOWN ] people with the knowledge of the [ UNKNOWN ]. We made all that to Zipline by using SMS or by using Whatsapp. The package is handed to flyers. You send a package in, that's when we put it on the launcher. [ UNKNOWN ] Fly mostly up to the hospital. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] Sunday. So just to give you a really quick sense for house, or first of all it's just worth mentioning, you know, these are a couple stories like a few of the patients that you're hearing from. But one of the most powerful things about what we do is that when you can help a doctor save a mom's life, you're also impacting the life of that child who is gonna get to grow up with a mom. Just to give you a really quick sense for how some of this technology works, we've had to build all of this from scratch. So we designed the aircraft. We designed the flight control algorithms, the launcher of this vehicle. Is accelerating from 0- 100 Kilometers in about half of a second. There are obviously no runways were we operate, so we have to find new solutions to all of these problems. Landing the aircraft is even more challenging, we need to decelerate the plane from 100 kilometers to 0 in about half of a second. And, so you may want to take a guess as to how that works. We used to actually aim for about a one meter target on the vehicle. But since then our flight control algorithms have gotten so precise that we're now aiming for about a one centimeter target on the airplane. So we're aiming for one centimeter. It's a very small hook on the back of the airplane. You'll see how this works. [ UNKNOWN ] the recovery system up, we can grab the airplane, [ UNKNOWN ] and swing it down. And we can do this about 500 times a day, so this is kind of a newer version of an aircraft carrier. We purpose to make healthcare work for the entire world. And one really cool thing I just want to quickly share, this is actually Just a screenshot of the iPad that we use to control these vehicles, this is just from two nights ago, we actually had a an emergency event at one of the hospitals that we serve, and had to send eight aircraft out all at the same time to make deliveries and work. Tracking this aircraft over the subnetworks which actually works quiet well, you gonna see six of these aircraft outbound waiting out making deliveries in two and now in bound I mean, meaning they already reserve coming home. What's really cool is that the work that we were doing Monday is now spreading so just a few months ago we announce that we are partnering with the government of Ghana to look for distribution centers [ UNKNOWN ] 20 million people. We are officially launching the first distribution center on April 24th. And we're going to be delivering all medical products to all of those 20 million people. So, this is a really exciting way that counties can actually achieve universal access to healthcare in a way that's way more economical than has previously been possible. And this distribution centers that we set up to do this, we can now set them up in about four days. The last one you see here took us four days. We're gonna be launching in Israel towards the end of the year and in the next few weeks we're gonna be announcing the first big partnership with a Healthcare Network in the U. S And a reason that we're so excited to be launched in a place like the US is that when we really think about what is the long- term potential of healthcare access especially in parts of the US that are really really challenged, we think you ought to be able to pick up a phone, have a video chat with the doctor, have the doctor figure out what you need and then have that product show up at your doorstep. Five minutes later, like that for us is a really exciting vision of what healthcare could be, and how we can equalize access to healthcare between people who live in cities. Over time, sorry, cities in real places. So, just in conclusion you know the the, I got to spend time at the Mayo Clinic a few months ago and was super blown away by how impressive and incredible the hospital, it was. But, the reality is that most people on the planet, this is their experience of healthcare, this is it, this is the primary care clinic in East Africa that sees over 1, 000 people a day. And so, it's now possible, technology has gotten us to a point where we can deliver. Product especially medical products is quickly and efficiently as internet deliver information and do so for every human on the planet. But we don't think that the long term impact of that technology is delivering peace breeders we think that they are really citing potential of that technology is providing universal access to health care for every single human, thanks. [ APPLAUSE ]

Saving Lives with Drones, Abroad and At Home

Health

Since its launch in 2016, Zipline drones have logged more than 300,000 miles, delivering thousands of units of blood and saving countless lives. 

Zipline

Videos