Zipline today unveiled its new platform that provides quiet, fast and precise autonomous delivery directly to homes in cities and suburbs.

The company’s next generation home delivery platform is practically silent (designed to sound like wind rustling leaves), and is expected to deliver up to 7 times as fast as traditional automobile delivery, completing 10-mile deliveries in about 10 minutes.

Zipline has spent the last several years building and fine tuning its next generation technology, Platform 2 (P2), to provide an optimal customer experience at scale.

Unlike other drone delivery services, Zipline’s drones (Zips) fly more than 300 feet above the ground and are nearly inaudible.

When the Zip arrives at its destination, it hovers safely and quietly at that altitude, while it’s fully autonomous delivery droid maneuvers down a tether, steers to the correct location, and gently drops off its package to areas as small as a patio table or the front steps of a home.

This is all made possible through major innovations in aircraft and propeller design.

Several businesses across the healthcare and restaurant sectors have already signed on to use Zipline’s new home delivery service.

Sweetgreen is partnering with Zipline to further its mission of connecting people to real food in the U.S., while moving a step closer to its pledge to be carbon-neutral by 2027.

By ordering through Zipline’s marketplace, Sweetgreen customers can get their orders using 97% less energy than traditional automotive methods.

“The future of delivery is faster, more sustainable and creates broader access, all of which provides improved value for our customers,” said Jonathan Neman, Co-Founder and CEO of Sweetgreen. “We couldn’t be more excited to work with Zipline to complement our delivery strategy. Zipline’s sustainable technology and ability to reach customers quickly, with a great delivery experience, will help us give our customers what they want, when they want it.”

Michigan Medicine will use Zipline’s new service to more than double the number of prescriptions it fills each year through its in-house pharmacy. Intermountain Health will use it to deliver prescriptions to patients’ homes in the Salt Lake City metro area.

MultiCare Health System plans to use the new platform to expedite diagnostics and deliver prescriptions and medical devices throughout MultiCare’s network of facilities, including hospitals, laboratories and doctors’ offices.

And Zipline’s first customer, the Government of Rwanda, will use the company’s new home delivery service to enable urban aerial last-mile delivery to homes, hotels and health facilities in Kigali and elsewhere in the country.

Zipline’s end-to-end solution seamlessly integrates with a business’s current operations. That includes its dual-use docking and charging hardware, software that easily works with third-party inventory management and ordering systems, an intuitive app that allows order tracking down to the second, and an autonomy system that has already guided the flight paths of 40 million commercial miles.

Zipline designed its docking and charging hardware to have a light footprint that can be attached to any building or set up as a freestanding structure.

A Zip can be easily loaded by a business’ employee who can send off orders in seconds, right from their location, without even having to leave the kitchen, pharmacy or doctors’ office. Businesses can offer Zipline’s home delivery service in a variety of ways, including native integrations into apps and websites, white labeled opportunities, and by joining Zipline’s marketplace. Customers can make on-demand orders, or schedule the exact time they’d like their package to arrive, down to the second.

Each P2 Zip has a 10-mile service radius while carrying a 6-8 pound payload for out-and-back deliveries from a single dock. Alternatively, it can also fly up to 24 miles one way from dock to dock, charging at each dock before picking up its next delivery. Because Zips can move from dock to dock, Zipline can dynamically respond to peak order times – ensuring there’s enough

delivery capacity for an urgent prescription delivery or a busy Friday pizza night or weekday lunch rush.

“Over the last decade, global demand for instant delivery has skyrocketed, but the technology we’re using to deliver is 100 years old. We’re still using the same 3,000-pound, gas combustion vehicles, driven by humans, to make billions of deliveries that usually weigh less than 5 pounds. It’s slow, it’s expensive, and it’s terrible for the planet,” said Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline. “Our new service is changing that and will finally make deliveries work for you and around your schedule. We have built the closest thing to teleportation ever created – a smooth, ultrafast, convenient, and truly magical autonomous logistics system that serves all people equally, wherever they are.”

Zipline plans to conduct high-volume flight tests this year involving more than 10,000 test flights using about 100 aircraft.

The first customer deployment of P2 will follow shortly after that. Zipline’s record for safety has been proven over the past seven years of operations and over more than 500,000 commercial flights. Its long-range platform, P1, has autonomously flown 40 million miles worth of commercial deliveries through all kinds of weather without a safety incident – the vast majority of which were flights flown beyond visual line of sight.

Zipline has received Part 135 certification, is authorized to complete the longest-range, on-demand commercial drone flights in America, and recently received FAA approval to enable its onboard autonomous detect and avoid system.

Zipline completed more deliveries in 2022 than in all previous years combined, and is planning to complete about 1 million deliveries by the end of 2023. By 2025, Zipline expects to operate more flights annually than most airlines.

A functioning supply chain complete with procurement, appropriate warehousing, and end-to-end transportation, is critical to making sure that people have access to essential, quality medicine. Increasingly, drones or “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAV) are being used to fill in key supply chain gaps, providing much-needed access to access to to medicine, medical supplies and vaccines.

By storing medicine, blood and other critical medical supplies and delivering them directly to health facilities, Zipline is helping the government of Ghana reduce wasted medication resulting from overstocking and expiration. Because health facilities can order on-demand, as needed, they no longer have to request large quantities of medicine from their national medical stores to make sure they have them in stock, ultimately resulting in over-ordering and expiration.

Charles Kofi Azagba, a District Director of Health in Ghana, recently said that “before the introduction of Zipline, [they] have been going through a lot of difficulties in getting medical and non-medical supplies to the various health facilities. However, with the coming of Zipline, [they] rarely run out of stock or even when [they] do, Zipline swiftly responds to them in less than 30-minutes”. 

Recently Nigeria became the third African country to use Zipline’s drone delivery system,  following national-scale operations in Ghana and Rwanda, with operations in Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire set to be launched later this year. 

Kaduna State, Nigeria has begun to procure medical commodities – vaccines, medicines, and blood – through the government supply chain and distribute them via the newly established Zipline distribution centre located at Pambegua.

With Zipline’s autonomous drone delivery service, health facilities can receive products within 45 minutes or less, rather than several days when using traditional, complex procurement systems.

Nigeria and other developing countries often lack adequate supply, correct doses and affordable medication at their health centres. In some cases, health ministries set up semi-autonomous entities such as a National Level Medical Store and Regional Medical Stores, to purchase, store and distribute medicine and medical supplies to health centres, hospitals and dispensaries across the country.

Within the rural settings already burdened with poverty, high disease, and lack of adequate resources to deliver quality healthcare to the population, drug shortages and an inadequate number and skill-mix of healthcare providers are very common in rural health facilities.

Zipline’s technology has proved to be a valuable tool in assisting governments in achieving access to universal healthcare and will help the government of Kaduna in achieving this goal.

A Zipline hub can send medical supplies to more than 500 health facilities within an 80km radius flying at about 110km/hour.

Within the first week of operation in Kaduna state, the company delivered over a thousand medical items to several health facilities.

Kaduna is just the beginning of the government’s’ partnership with Zipline. They have already announced partnerships with the Cross River and Bayelsa states, with an aim to begin operations before the end of 2022, serving thousands of health facilities across Nigeria.