The Exchanges

Q Wonderful. Ok, so, we have some really big news today that we need to address. Can you share this latest funding announcement?

A Yeah, I mean, you know, we, Zipline just closed, uh, over six hundred twenty-five million dollars, uh, which is going to accelerate our expansion both in the United States and outside the US. The big thing that happened last year is that the international part of Zipline's business, particularly the life-saving work that we do in Africa, uh, grew incredibly fast. I mean, we, uh, are now saving about 17,000 lives a year. We're gonna go from serving about 5000 hospitals and health facilities To over 20,000 hospitals and health facilities in the next 18 months. We had almost no operations in the U.S. at the beginning of last year, and we have now expanded to the point where Zipline actually does more deliveries in the U.S. than it does in the rest of the world combined. So that grew really fast, and we're expecting that business to grow, uh, by more than 10 X this year again. And so, uh, really the fundraising is designed to position Zipline so that we are ready from a capex, from a manufacturing, Uh, from an operations perspective to add a lot more metros over the coming, uh, you know, four quarters.

AI assessment note: “Zipline just closed, uh, over six hundred twenty-five million dollars”

Q For people that don't know, like, what are the typical products that they can order, and do you have any partnerships with people?

A Yeah, Zipline works with amazing global brands like Walmart, Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Mendocino Farms, Wendy's, Buffalo Wild Wings, many, many others. We all also this year are launching our healthcare business in the US. We're partnered with folks like Cleveland Clinic and Ohio Health and Michigan Medicine and many others. Um, all of this is really just enabling teleportation from their stores, restaurants, or Health facilities directly to homes. So we actually got a, you know, a text the other day from someone who was like, oh, you know, it was late at night. My two-year-old was feeling terrible. I had a terrible fever. I was freaking out trying to figure out, like, am I going to really get this kid into the car and, like, buckle them in and drive to the local pharmacy and wait in line and try to, and then she thought, oh wait, never mind, zipline, and they deliver pharmacy now from Walmart. She got on, ordered exactly what she needed. It was delivered less than 10 minutes later. Gave it to the kid. Kid felt better. Went to sleep. She got sleep that night. She wrote us this long email the next morning being like, you have no idea how game-changing it is to have access to this kind of a service that just feels, you know, it feels like a different thing. And these kinds of services, you know, today with most of our partners, we're operating something like 16, 17 hours a day. Um, o…

AI assessment note: “Zipline works with amazing global brands like Walmart, Chipotle, Sweetgreen”

Q with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. I've done several, if not a lot of interviews with the defense tech sector, which has a different kind of payload, but for you, have you gotten any demand or interest from that sector for buying any of the drones?

A Yeah, all the time. I mean, I think interestingly, this is an area where because of the nature of the market, um, the commercial progress that's being made technologically is, is, Exceeding the military progress that's being made in this area, probably by, like, an order of magnitude. So these systems, and, and by the way, you see that in Ukraine, where it's like the vast majority of those drones that were being used, they're basically commercial drones with, like, slight modifications, you know, where you put Z-IV on them. Um, same thing is happening here, where the military is also going to want access to autonomous logistics. I think in the long run, It's just a hundred percent the case that the military should be buying commercial solutions rather than trying to create their own kind of, like, exquisite, bespoke solutions to that problem because, um, commercial market is so big, there's so much capital available to improve all the main components of the technology that, um, the military no longer has to do this in a one-off way. Right now, Zipline is so completely overwhelmed with demand on the commercial side that, like, We're doing one thing and one thing only. It's all we have time to focus on. You know, Zipline is gonna scale to a million deliveries a day over the next couple years, and that is gonna require us to continue that rate of, like, 15% week-over-week growth f…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, all the time.”

Q back to Alfred's point. So he was talking about all the different kinds of investments he's made and things that he's learned and the principles, and he noted zipline for the capital P pivot versus the lowercase p pivot. So could you just talk about that shift, like that dramatic shift and how you had to reorient and now you're building out vertical integration and doing all this crazy stuff?

A Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when we started, when we started building this company, I mean, I was 23 years old. We were totally clueless. We had no idea what we were doing. Alfred ended up, um, being our first, like, institutional investor, investing in the company, and I kind of went to him at that time. I mean, we were, we were building all kinds of different solutions, but none of them were really working. We, we knew that we were really interested in robotics, and the more I learned, the more I kind of concluded that we should really go focus on logistics. The problem was, You know, we wanted to build an autonomous logistics system that could deliver 10 times as fast, half the cost. It was very obvious we should build something that could fly and that could deliver from any, ah, you know, store or restaurant or hospital or primary care facility directly to homes. That was illegal. And so I think that was probably the nature of my disagreement with Alfred. I was like, Alfred, I have a good idea. Let's go do something that's illegal. And he's like, I don't know if it's a good idea to go do something that's illegal. Caller, like, can we, you know, pick a business model that is legal? Um, and of course, you know, the whole, The, the whole crazy conversation around that was like, okay, well then we're gonna go to somewhere where it is legal. And I think that this naivete th…

AI assessment note: “we were building all kinds of different solutions, but none of them were really working.”

Q Um, I think it would be actually pretty cool if we brought back those, like, vacuum sealed tubes. Do you remember those?

A We talk about those all the time. Yeah, like the pneumatic tube systems basically for hospitals. It's funny you should mention that because actually that's exactly how we describe this product to hospital systems that we're working with. Because they used to have those systems, and they would basically walk to a wall, they'd put something, and they'd stick it in a tube, and it'd instantly be teleported somewhere else in the building. And so the way we talk to people about this is like, it's exactly like your pneumatic tube system. But now, instead of going somewhere else in the building, it can be automatically teleported to any home, you know, within range. And so, yeah, it's very exactly the same paradigm. I think these kinds of systems, those tube systems though, they're very expensive. They take a long time to install. They can only really serve like the building or an overall like facility.

AI assessment note: “We talk about those all the time. Yeah, like the pneumatic tube systems”

Q You recently got up to five hundred and fifty million dollars to expand into Africa. Can you break this down?

A Yeah, I mean, we announced this a couple weeks ago. Um, you know, it's really coming, uh, from the, the US government, the State Department, trying to redefine how it is delivering healthcare and, uh, you know, providing help to developing economies. Um, obviously, you know, USAID was shut down a year ago. I think there was this, you know, huge political battle over that, over, like, what was the impact? But, you know, interestingly, the countries themselves have been extremely consistent. You know, as I mentioned before, like, they want They want trade, not aid. They, they, they want AI and robotics, not cost plus contracting provided by US NGOs. Like this should not be that surprising to anybody who has kind of, um, spent time in Africa or, you know, sees the analogs in the US. Um, and so the, the, uh, Basically, the U.S. government is taking a new approach they're calling commercial diplomacy with the idea that, look, like, we want to be helping these countries turbocharge their economies and leapfrog into the future, but they should be doing it by working directly with U.S. companies, and we should be using that to, um, to secure U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership for the decade to come. Um, and so, you know, Zipline is already, in a lot of these countries, operating large autonomous logistics systems, delivering life-saving medical care, um, and the, the, Kind of…

AI assessment note: “countries themselves are committing, uh, uh, an overwhelming majority of the CapEx and OpEx”