CALIFORNIA drone company, Zipline, raised US$250 million to expand operations in Africa and the US, reports Bloomberg News.
The funding follows a demand surge for Zipline's services in Ghana and Rwanda, where it delivers medicine and other supplies to rural hospitals and clinics.
'Covid has significantly accelerated all of our timelines,' said Zipline co-founder Keller Rinaudo.
'As more and more health systems were betting on us, we were realising that the opportunity is bigger and we need to be making big investments,' he said.
'Our hope is to get to most states in the US and most homes over the coming years,' said Mr Rinaudo.
'People have a hard time differentiating what Zipline does from a company that might be building a quad-copter and might deliver once by duct taping a Snickers bar to the bottom of it,' he said.
Zipline investors include Scottish investment firm Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Investments, and Singapore's state-owned fund Temasek. Zipline has raised $486 million to date.
Said Temasek director Aftab Mathur: 'Of all the startups that we have seen in this space, they are the folks that are actually thinking about it the way a large tech company would.'
Zipline began serving its first hospital in Rwanda in 2016 and its fleet of fixed-wing drones makes deliveries to more than 2,500 sites, where the company expects to reach 6,000 locations by the end of this year.
Over the last five years, the company has flown 10 million miles and made more than 150,000 deliveries.
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The funding follows a demand surge for Zipline's services in Ghana and Rwanda, where it delivers medicine and other supplies to rural hospitals and clinics.
'Covid has significantly accelerated all of our timelines,' said Zipline co-founder Keller Rinaudo.
'As more and more health systems were betting on us, we were realising that the opportunity is bigger and we need to be making big investments,' he said.
'Our hope is to get to most states in the US and most homes over the coming years,' said Mr Rinaudo.
'People have a hard time differentiating what Zipline does from a company that might be building a quad-copter and might deliver once by duct taping a Snickers bar to the bottom of it,' he said.
Zipline investors include Scottish investment firm Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Investments, and Singapore's state-owned fund Temasek. Zipline has raised $486 million to date.
Said Temasek director Aftab Mathur: 'Of all the startups that we have seen in this space, they are the folks that are actually thinking about it the way a large tech company would.'
Zipline began serving its first hospital in Rwanda in 2016 and its fleet of fixed-wing drones makes deliveries to more than 2,500 sites, where the company expects to reach 6,000 locations by the end of this year.
Over the last five years, the company has flown 10 million miles and made more than 150,000 deliveries.
SeaNews Turkey
