Theory of Change: #17: Zipline's global drone delivery vision

The California-based drone delivery company Zipline made waves last year when it secured a $150 million pay-for-performance grant from the U.S. State Department to scale up its operations in Africa.

That announcement came just months after the State Department took control of the U.S. government’s foreign aid portfolio in the wake of USAID’s dismantling, and the deal with Zipline was portrayed as an emblem of the new direction of U.S. global health aid.

One year later, Zipline is working through the sometimes arduous process of negotiating with partner country governments over the terms of their expansion. But the company’s ambitions extend well beyond the five African countries included in the State Department grant.

At the same time, a new partnership with Uber has the company poised for massive expansion inside the United States, from healthcare to consumer goods — driving estimates of Zipline’s potential valuation to $20 billion.

Zipline is expanding into urban environments, launching its precision delivery platform in cities such as Kigali, Rwanda, while scaling healthcare partnerships in the U.S. with major institutions like the Cleveland Clinic and the Veterans Affairs hospital system. The same autonomous tech that delivers critical blood products in West Africa is now poised to power instant delivery for retail and food.

Zipline’s Africa CEO and head of international expansion, Caitlin Burton, joined Devex’s Theory of Change podcast for a live recording at the Devex Impact House in New York. Burton shared the company’s growth story — from its origins in Rwanda to Uber Eats — and its planetary ambitions.

“We have to grow way faster over the next five years than we did in the last five years,” Burton said. “We are just now getting to national scale in really, really, really important places. We need to do that in many, many more places.”

Behind Zipline’s expansion plans, there is also a critique of legacy global health institutions and funding structures, which the company found resistant to what they could offer.

“People were staking out territory instead of operating a system, and that was weird to us,” Burton said.

“There are three things you really need in a health system: you need well-trained health workers that are compensated ... you need the drugs themselves, and then you need a way to get them to the patient,” Burton said. “Everyone seemed to have forgotten about the supply system.”