BREAKING: Zipline Hits $7.6B Valuation on $600M+ Round

2M+ Deliveries | CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

World’s Largest Autonomous Delivery System

Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton joins Sourcery from Zipline’s drone factory to break down the company’s $600M+ funding round at a $7.6B valuation, a clear step up from Zipline’s ~$5B valuation in 2024, as the company enters a major U.S. and global scaling phase.

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The round includes participation from leading investors like Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Valor Equity Partners, and Tiger Global, underwriting Zipline’s expansion across manufacturing capacity, fleet CapEx, and metro-level infrastructure as demand accelerates.

Zipline has now surpassed 2 million commercial deliveries & flown 125M+ commercial autonomous miles, making it the world’s largest autonomous delivery system. The company operates on four continents, serves 5,000+ hospitals & health facilities, and delivers food, retail, and healthcare products directly to customers’ homes in minutes. Zipline’s zero-emission aircraft have delivered more than 20M items with no serious injuries & are saving 10,000+ lives per year in the process.

“For context, in the U.S, driving 120 million miles meant nearly 600 crashes, about 100 injuries, and at least one fatality, according to NHTSA data. The shift to a better, safer, more convenient future is only just beginning.”

In the U.S., Zipline is scaling at exceptional speed. U.S. deliveries have grown by approximately 15% week over week for the last seven months, and Keller shares that Zipline now does more deliveries in the United States than the rest of the world combined. In Dallas, Zipline’s first site took 10 weeks to reach 100 deliveries per day, while newer sites reached that same volume in just 2 days—a clear signal the system is moving from early adoption to everyday infrastructure.

“Zipline spent a decade working on something that everybody thought was stupid and nobody was interested,” said Keller, “We were never part of the hype cycle.”

We also cover Zipline’s relationships with Walmart, Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Mendocino Farms, Wendy’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Cleveland Clinic, OhioHealth, Michigan Medicine, and others; upcoming launches in Houston and Phoenix, where customers will soon be able to order tens of thousands of items with deliveries arriving in as little as 10 minutes, Zipline’s vertically integrated manufacturing strategy, and why Keller believes autonomous, on-demand logistics will soon be the norm across multiple U.S. states.

Bonus: Keller explains why insane TikTok virality forced them to shut off their marketing efforts, and how the company thinks about becoming a trillion-dollar automated logistics platform over time.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Keller R. Cliffton, Co-Founder & CEO, Zipline
(01:11) The Cow Ranch origin story and Zipline’s latest fundraise
(06:42) Zipline, the world’s largest commercial autonomous system
(08:32) Alfred Lin and Sequoia’s early bet on Zipline
(10:59) Building healthcare logistics that actually work
(16:02) Why Zipline doesn’t need marketing?
(20:23) Legos, rotisserie chickens, and delivering almost everything
(22:51) When off-the-shelf hardware isn’t good enough
(26:55) Defense interest and why Zipline stays commercially focused
(29:47) What is Zipline’s “magical portal” model?
(32:17) A simple decision that saved Zipline
(37:17) Hiring mission-driven builders from Tesla and SpaceX
(39:20) Learning how to scale from Tesla’s former CFO
(41:28) The trillion-dollar path: 50B deliveries at 10x frequency
(44:59) Expanding Africa operations with strong US government backing
(47:33) Why this is the best time to be alive

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