Drone Delivery Firm Zipline Valued at $21.5 Billion After Nearly Collapsing Two Years Ago

Zipline, a US company that delivers goods and medical supplies by drone, announced on Thursday a $1.5 billion funding round at a valuation of $21.5 billion. Co-founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton then posted a thread on X describing how the company got here. He wrote that for its first ten years investors did not consider Zipline investable, and that about two years ago it almost died.

From a cow farm to Africa

Zipline dates from 2014 and began in Half Moon Bay, California, which remains one of its flight test sites. It worked out of run-down construction trailers on a cow farm to keep engineering, manufacturing and flight testing together. Flying autonomously in the United States was illegal at the time, so persuading investors was very hard.

The company therefore launched in smaller countries and chose use cases where a late delivery could cost a life. It hired operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and elsewhere, and spent eight years building out in Africa before launching at scale in the US last year. Rwandan President Paul Kagame launched the first aircraft in October 2016, after two weeks in which the system had not worked. Zipline says its African network cut maternal mortality by 51%, saves more than 14,000 lives a year and is cash flow positive. DroneXL notes that the 51% comes from a Wharton study measuring in-hospital deaths after childbirth, a narrower measure.

Near collapse and growth

According to Rinaudo Cliffton, the company nearly folded while trying to launch its next-generation Platform 2 system, which was ten times as complex as anything it had built, was not working and was running out of money. The aircraft made its first customer delivery in January 2025. By his count, flight volume has grown about 100 times in 18 months. Dallas-Fort Worth alone passed one million deliveries in 2026, and Walmart has signed for 300 more supercenters.

Safety and the Amazon comparison

Zipline says its deliveries are six times quieter than its closest competitor's and that it has had no safety incidents in 150 million autonomous miles. DroneXL notes that two Zipline aircraft came down under parachute in Texas this summer, with nobody hurt. Rival Amazon asked on October 30 to withdraw a Prime Air pad application in Westborough, Massachusetts, after the town meeting voted 510 to 13 to ban commercial drone launch pads. Amazon says it will resubmit a revised project.