Zipline, the drone delivery firm has completed one million commercial drone deliveries to customers and more than 70 million commercial autonomous miles across four continents and delivered more than 10 million products.
The firm has also launched Zipline’s Platform 2 (P2) system which will also be used to deliver orders from Panera Bread, Memorial Hermann Health System and Jet’s Pizza starting in the greater Seattle, Houston, and Detroit metro areas respectively.
“Over the past decade, we’ve worked hard to build a system that scaled to 1 million paid customer deliveries. In the near future, I believe that 1 million deliveries will be unremarkable as we reach a million deliveries in a year, in a month, in a day,” said Ryan Oksenhorn, Co-Founder of Zipline and Head of Software. “10 years from now, I think clean, reliable autonomous delivery of goods and services will be available to everyone.”
Zipline is now scaling in the U.S. after recent regulatory approvals and will begin rolling out P2, which is expected to serve more than 30 million people in 10 states within the United States over the next few years. Some of the firms working with Zipline is Flynn Group, the largest franchise operator in the world, which runs the Panera Bread brand. Another client is Memorial Hermann Health System, one of the largest not-for-profit health systems in Texas which will use Zipline to deliver specialty prescriptions and medical devices directly to patients’ homes, as well as to transport medicine, medical products, and lab samples between its facilities. Jet’s Pizza, with more than 400 locations across 22 states, will begin using Zipline to deliver orders starting in its home of Detroit.
About 4 billion instant deliveries happen each year in the U.S. and this expansion comes at a time when more people are looking for consistent, convenient delivery options. Zipline aims to tap into this big US market in addition to its medical partnerships in Africa.