Sweetgreen, the Government of Rwanda, Michigan Medicine and more
will be a few of the First Customers to deploy Zipline’s New Platform
South San Francisco, California (March 15, 2023) – Zipline, the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery system ,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.
At a virtual ceremony held today to unveil its next generation delivery technology, the company revealed it 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. According to the officials, Unlike other drone delivery services, the drones (
also called 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 its 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 the company 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. The brands 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.”
Other partners such as 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. The logistics
company 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 easily be 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.
Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Cofounder & CEO, Zipline
“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. The companys 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.
The brand 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, it expects to operate more flights annually than most airlines.
