Zipline completes 1,000,000 commercial drone deliveries

Zipline, the world’s largest autonomous delivery system, became the first company in history to complete one million commercial drone deliveries to customers.

"If Zipline’s autonomous software was a human pilot, it would have already spent more than 120 years flying in the air," says an official release.

Zipline’s zero-emission drones have now flown more than 70 million commercial autonomous miles across four continents and delivered more than 10 million products, the release added. "Demand for Zipline’s service is growing too. Zipline’s Platform 2 (P2) system 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."

Zipline has made 70 percent of its deliveries in the last two years alone as the company expanded to serve new use cases like retail deliveries with Walmart, agriculture and animal health efforts across Africa, and food delivery in Japan. "In the U.S., Zipline’s most frequently delivered items are fresh produce while internationally they are child nutrition and vaccines."

Ryan Oksenhorn, Co-Founder and Head of Software, Zipline says: "Over the past decade, we’ve worked hard to build a system that scaled to one million paid customer deliveries. In the near future, I believe that one million deliveries will be unremarkable as we reach a million deliveries in a year, in a month, in a day. 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. thanks to recent regulatory approvals of its on-board perception system for beyond visual line of sight commercial delivery operations, the release added. "In the coming quarters, Zipline 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."

Every Zipline delivery is made using electric, zero-emission drones that have collectively saved more than 750,000 gallons of gas compared to making the same deliveries with cars, the release added.