Zipline partners with Chipotle and hits record flight volumes, growing 25–30% week over week

reream waiting room. Big news. Zipotle is now live. Chipotle partners with Zipline for aerial delivery. What more could you stream? How you doing? Even more dramatic background this time. Every time you deliver. Thank you so much for hopping on. That's our job, right? Yeah, that was unintentional.

Uh anyway, uh how did this come together? It seems it seems like the perfect partner. Walk us through the the evolution that actually what went into the announcement. Yeah, I mean we we we've been talking to Chipotle for a while. We obviously have announced a few other restaurant partners.

Um I mean you know for reference like there was a time in my life where I lived on Chipotle. Like that was my every entrepreneur every entrepreneur has like a Chipotle era. Raise your hand in the studio if you've lived on Chipotle. I think everyone's it's yeah you're getting more.

It's just a period of your life where you're getting more calories from Chipotle than anywhere else. Oh yes, absolutely. I can distinctly remember uh those moments. It's the base of the pyramid. I also remember I also remember I feel like you guys would appreciate this.

You know, there was a time when I was living out of my car action like eating Chipotle and you know $10 you could get like two full meals out of it. Then you could you could get like the tortillas too like those tortillas. There's a lot of optimization that you can do.

And I I remember thinking that like one day I will know like it like how will I know if I'm rich? I will be able to get the guacamole every time without feeling guilty about I have the exact same story.

When I went through YC in 2012, uh my business partner, my co-founder would always get double meat and I was like, "We're trying to save money. We don't we can't afford double meat. " And double beans. Double beans are free. It was tearing us apart.

And then I finally just defaulted to like, look, if you if you're going to get it, I'm going to get it, too. And we will both fall on the sword of higher burn. And and to this day, if I moral hazard. Yeah. Moral hazard.

But to this day, if I eat out with him uh and we're at a restaurant, I'll just be like, get whatever he gets cuz I know he's going to get something ridiculous and he's getting the most expensive thing on the menu. And at least then I get stuck with the half of the bill and I'm happy.

And I'm not like, ah, I got stuck paying for his expensive thing. Anyway, congratulations. We love We love Chipotle. Um what what else what what else can you share about the progress of the business?

It felt like you know classic overnight success as we love to talk about on the show but um also how did you get them to actually name it? Their idea that was their idea not oursing.

I think you know look I I think that what we're you know obviously there's this like big transformation coming in AI and robotics and there are a lot of you know very fancy hyperscalers that get talked about all the time but the reality is that like all the basic businesses and brands that we use and love also want to be able to take advantage of this kind of technology and so I think a lot of you know some some of the biggest brands like Chipotle are asking themselves like hey how can we use robotics automation to like accelerate or you know dramatically transform our own brand and the kinds of experiences we can provide to customers.

So yeah, them choosing Zipotle, us trying to deliver for them. I mean, I think that we did a delivery in 5 minutes yesterday from like order made to the thing arriving at a customer's house. Um, that's not possible every time, just to be clear.

It does take time to make the food, but like, you know, I think that something showing up super super fast like that. In fact, we've we've found it has been necessary because we we've only started really rapidly scaling these food deliveries in the last couple months.

It's actually necessary to tell customers to slow down and make sure to blow on the food. We've had people accidentally burn themselves. Um good problem to have. Yeah. Weird weird thing, right? People are just used to it being cold or smush. Yeah. Just not not that great.

So, um you know, really cool to see that starting to scale, especially for a brand that's like very near and dear to my entrepreneurial journey and heart.

Um I mean yeah you know other things that we're seeing even since we were last 10 weeks ago or something yeah a couple couple months ago um we have seen you know a problem that we were having in July was that the service was growing extremely fast between 25 and 30% week overw week in terms of flight volumes um in in in fact yeah like so you know Saturday new record high flight volume Sunday we actually beat Saturday by 20%.

This is just two days ago. Yesterday, you know, Monday was a record day. Tuesday was a record day. Really cool. So, if you keep if you keep giving us records, I'm going to keep hitting the So, cooler with the records.

No, but even like even cooler is that um you know, right now the service has a net promoter score of 94. So, you know, no very few services in the United States are close to that today. um let alone delivery services. Uh customers are ordering a lot of customers are ordering like three to four times per week.

In fact, we have many customers who are ordering a couple times a day via the service. I think that you know when you realize you can get stuff in 5 minutes, it actually starts to change the way that you kind of live your lives.

It's giving people back like three or four hours a week when they can just be focusing on their kids or on their family rather than like stressing out with traffic and trying to get somewhere.

um the at this rate in a couple months um our deliveries in the US are going to exceed all of our global flight volume across eight other countries. So yeah, US is growing super super fast. Now we're launching a new Walmart Super Center every week at this pace.

Um it's just yeah it's I think uh you know I think the moment for automation and autonomous delivery has arrived. So is is Walmart 10-year overnight success?

Should I think about the expansion as driven by go where the Walmarts are and then talk to the city officials to get support and Walmart's kind of like the backbone or is it more like find other cities like Dallas me whether they're in Texas or not and then partner with companies and businesses that are in those kind of friendly cities that understand the value that this can bring and the demand and then uh and then kind of roll out that way like is there a particular path that you're taking like how should I imagine the map of Zipline growing or the coverage map growing over the next few years?

Yeah, that's a really preient question. I mean, Walmart has been a key partner. We're building a lot of charging infrastructure across these metros with them. Um, we're also building independent charging infrastructure that's just designed to serve a lot of different customers at once.

So, for example, we just um opened a big charging site uh in uh uh Rowlet.

It's a small city inside da small town inside Dallas where like that one site is going to be able to serve I think upwards of 40 or 50 restaurants that are all within range and then from there we can deliver out to customer homes as long as they're within 10 miles.

So like one key thing to think about here is it's kind of a network optimization problem but we go a lot farther than normal delivery. you know, where you have a human driving a car wants to go any from any given restaurant, you can typically reach 10 times as many people via instant delivery. Wow.

Um, as as via, you know, traditional delivery. So, and again, um, you know, 10 times as fast. So, we're really focused on going metro by metro right now. A lot of our costs, you know, maintenance, it kind of happens on a metro basis. So, we're we're going to go tall. Like the goal is to go very tall in each metro.

We have a lot of metros now that are like super super excited and basically on the road map for us to launch. Um um and and we're we're trying to build the capacity and launch them as quickly as possible. But you know building this kind of infrastructure across the US it's like it's a big undertaking.

Um, and you know the other the other cool thing to mention just really quick is that like you know one thing I'm very very proud of more proud of every day. I mean Zipline now has 120 million commercial autonomous miles is the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth. Zero safety incidents. That's the main point.

Zero safety incidents. So actually if you just look at the basic safety of cars globally the system is already provably about 10 times as safe as cars um in terms of fatalities or injuries.

Um and you know from that safety perspective I mean like you know zipline is actually right now about um we have we have already achieved a level of safety that is 2x our goal that we had set by the end of this year. So like again safety and reliability is kind of everything.

It's like core of what we do and it's a big part of like why I think cities are starting to understand like this is a um incontrovertibly good thing. Is this a problem for Pizza Hut? Pizza Hut famously the buildings are huts. You can't land on the roof.

How are we going to get pizzas from Pizza Hut in uh The important questions. The important questions. But but seriously, like is there I thought you were talking about the size of the pizza. Oh, no. Because actually I want to know you are working on a pizza compatible. We just we just cut it in half. Oh, great.

The company we already have we already have the box designed for a couple different pizza partners. It works great. Should should uh should franchises be thinking about a flat roof? Is that relevant?

uh what does the actual infrastructure look like uh as and like should should restaurants and businesses be thinking about zipline compatibility as they roll out the next like version of their of their retail infrastructure or their their residential plan or the real estate plan. Yeah. So, it's pretty cool.

I mean, first of all, one of the things we announced just in the last couple months is something we call zipping points. And zipping points are um really simple infrastructure. We pay for it. We can drop it in 2 hours. It does not have to be permitted. There's no construction.

As long as we drop a zipping point with a restaurant or a retailer or a hospital or primary care facility, they're instantly enabled with zipline delivery. Got it. No power, no permitting, nothing. Y do not have to do anything for the building.

Interestingly, we are talking to like a lot of hotels, a lot of apartment buildings and a lot of even these restaurants as they cuz for example, a lot of these big restaurant brands, they'll only have like two or three or four total designs of buildings that they'll build.

And um they are in fact now starting to take into account Zipline and they're starting to design specifically for autonomous delivery. You don't have to do that, but you can.

You know, one big point I would make here is that like the thing that blows my mind, I mean, starting to see this like exponential takeoff from a demand perspective.

I would emphasize, by the way, we freaked out enough about demand four weeks ago that we turned off all marketing, all demand generation marketing in the company. We turned off all the inapp notifications. We turned off all the field marketing that we were doing. and it basically made no difference.

Like we continue to grow 25 or 30%, you know, week over week. I think that um what the reason this is happening in retrospect is kind of obvious which is, you know, we're now starting to deliver to um a lot of offices. We're delivering to a lot of apartment buildings. We're delivering to universities.

Like I think the product more viral. Yeah. When you think about the virality of the product, I mean I'm sure this is already happening or will happen which is a my story about this. Yeah.

my brain goes to some guys at a fraternity order a 30 rack gets dropped into the backyard and I don't know if you're doing that you're probably not doing that yet but uh that is a very viral moment that people will be taking videos of for a long time they'll you can you can see I mean tons of people are doing Tik Toks and a lot of those Tik Toks are getting seen like seven eight million times we were actually initially asking customers to not um like you know put stuff on social just because like we wanted a chance to do an early access program and kind of like, you know, iron out the kinks.

But yeah, even even even people who aren't customers are sometimes like videoing their neighbor getting a delivery and then putting it on TikTok and having it get seen millions of times. So, it is cool. Incredible. Amazing stuff. Always always great to chat with you.

Shout out to Danielle, your or whoever's running your your comm's program because your remote your your remote call-in setup, I think, is the best of any. This is this is the I mean, this is the manufacturing line.

So this this line is ultimately capable of producing about 55,000 aircraft a year and and that's scaling to that as fast as we possibly can. That's so many. We have to we have to learn how to build drones in the US. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very excited about doing it. Thank you. Uh we will talk to you soon.

Have a great welcome here. Anytime. Talk soon. Kelly. All right. Cheers. Talk soon. Thanks. Up next we have eightsleep. com. Get a pot five Ultra. I put on a clinic last night. Jordy P. My favorite soundboard Q. I got a 90. Oh, good for you. I got an 84 roasted 100% quality, 88% consistency, 6 hours and 31 minutes.

Slept. I'm on a