Zipline, the US company that started out flying blood to hospitals in Rwanda, has raised $1.5 billion at a post-money valuation of $21.5 billion. The round was led by Paradigm, WCM Investment Management and Layer Global, with Uber, Fidelity, Valor Equity Partners, Tiger Global, JPMorgan, ARK Invest and Salesforce Ventures also taking part.
The valuation is close to three times the $7.6 billion Zipline was valued at earlier this year. Alongside the funding, the company signed a multiyear agreement with Walmart to open up to 300 new delivery sites, on top of the 21 it already runs with the retailer. Zipline said the money will go into manufacturing, hiring and delivery infrastructure.
From medical supplies to takeaway food
Zipline’s early business was built in Africa, using long-range fixed-wing drones to drop blood and medicines at clinics that were hard to reach by road. It has since added a smaller, short-range system for consumer orders. That drone hovers high above a home and lowers a package on a tether, so it never needs to land.
The consumer business is what investors are now paying for. Zipline says it completed more than one million deliveries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area alone this year, and that its median delivery time in October was 19 minutes from checkout. Hundreds of businesses now sell through its network. Uber, also an investor, plans to bring Zipline into Uber Eats in existing markets before expanding to new cities, and the two have set a target of one million drone deliveries a day by the end of 2029.
These are company figures, and some of the sales data comes from a selected group of restaurant partners. Zipline also says its aircraft have flown 150 million commercial autonomous miles without a safety incident. Not everyone is convinced the neighbourhood will welcome the traffic: noise is an obvious concern, and Zipline has added noise-reduction technology to its operations. Some commentators expect local pushback against drones to grow as fleets get bigger.
What it means here
Bangladesh has the kind of geography that made Zipline’s first business work: river islands, char lands, haor wetlands and hill areas where a road trip to a clinic can take hours, especially during the monsoon. Delivering medicines, vaccines, blood or diagnostic samples by drone is a practical idea here, not science fiction.
The obstacles are regulatory and commercial rather than technical. Flying drones in Bangladesh requires official permission, and the rules have been written mainly with security in mind, which makes routine, beyond-line-of-sight delivery hard. Dense cities and crowded airspace around Dhaka add further limits.
A sensible path would mirror Zipline’s own history: start with public health routes in remote districts, where the benefit is clear and the airspace is quiet, and build a safety record before any talk of food or parcel delivery in cities. Local startups and e-commerce firms watching the Zipline round should note that its valuation rests on years of operating data. Policymakers, for their part, could open a controlled testing framework so that data can be gathered here.
