Zipline raises $600M at $7.6B valuation, launches EV3 aircraft, and sets sights on every US metro

organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we will bring in Keller from [music] Zipline out of the Ram rating room and into the TBP and Ultradump. Keller, how are you doing?

There he is.

Hey guys, how are you?

Fantastic, but not as good as you. Give us the news. What happened?

So, yesterday, yeah, yesterday we had some big announcements. I mean, first of all, you know, the company just raised more than $600 million to fund um US [music] and global expansion.

Got to go with the gong. But even even cooler, I mean, you guys know like on X, Zipline is constantly, you know, kind of celebrating how fast the system has been growing. It's been growing about 15% week over week over the last year. Um, but we are finally announcing new metros. So, we announced Houston and Phoenix as the metros that we're going to be launching over the next couple months. And then every quarter that passes now, we'll be announcing new major metros that we're bringing autonomous delivery to.

Talk to me about what it takes to launch a metro. Is that the the mayor's calling you, you're calling the mayor? Is there a form that you're filling out? Like, how what's the process? Do you have sales reps going? Do you set up an office? Like, do you do tests? what's involved

in the main thing you know this is different people think of hyperscalers and people adding metros you know with

uh some of you know the the ride share companies for example where you were just hiring people who already live there I mean zipline is building infrastructure in these cities it looks a little bit more maybe like how Tesla was building superchargers we are actually building superchargers but for airplanes rather than for cars

and uh and so we're going in we're building maintenance depots we're creating a lot of highpaying jobs for both maintenance as well as um as well as all the people who are doing uh you know community engagement, government affairs, permitting. Uh there's a lot of complexity for each metro that we launch. But uh you know the uh the reality is that we're we're trying to scale. I mean 50% week overweek growth is really hard to keep up with and uh and so we're trying to add you know we'll add multiple metros every quarter as we go here um as we accelerate. Uh what makes uh what what makes for for a metro area uh that that that's exciting to to zipline?

Both of those don't seem very snowy. Is that important?

Well, yeah. And and I know you're going to be announcing a lot more in the future, but for people listening that are excited to have zipline in their area, I feel like if you kind of describe the sort of ideal uh metro, maybe people can kind of start figuring it out.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean ultimately we're going to be in every metro in the US in the in the next couple of years. Um, one thing that we just did that, you know, I was posting some cool stuff on X. Uh, we just launched a brand new test site in the Cascades, which is an Oregon. We have a team that is operating there in insane snow, insane ice, insane sleeping conditions, day in and day out. All of Zip Lines test sites operate 24/7, by the way. So, um, why are we doing that? We're doing that so that we can be ready by the end of this year to start launching cities in a wide variety of you know uh uh climates across the US and then eventually across the world. So it just takes time to basically validate um all the different technology,

aircraft, ground infrastructure um across these different conditions and you really want to do it comprehensively and test before you then operate you know over tens of millions millions of people's heads.

Yeah. What's the hardware life cycle like? Uh is there a like a v2 v3 that comes and gets rolled out to all the metros? Is there testing? Like are there new innovations that are happening deeper in the supply chain that you're excited about uh implementing? What uh what needs to happen or what are you excited about on the development of the actual platform?

Well, you know, funny you should ask. So, basically right behind me, so I'm standing in a new part of the manufacturing facility. um Zipline's manufacturing facility um tripled in size in the last two months. This was all this was all nothing

actually. I don't know you know if you realize but like

15% people don't put it together. We just had a board meeting last week where we started board meeting by being like oh yeah uh you know flight volumes and revenue tripled since the last board meeting 3 months ago. So [laughter] the manufacturing growth is pretty much in line with the business growth. But um

you know this space was all empty a month ago and it is now the new line for next generation aircraft. It's called EV3. Um the advantages of of this next generation I mean right now Zipline is rapidly cycling through hardware software plus all the operational improvements we need to make uh uh you know to to continue to advance the the technology. But the uh you know EV3 has a huge number of performance improvements relative to the system that we've been operating over the last year and it's half the cost.

So you know there's giant uh you know steps being made improvements possible because the technology is so early. It's 12:01 a.m. when it comes to automated logistics. This facility where I'm standing will be capable of building 20,000 aircraft a year. It's the largest autonomous aircraft factory in the United States.

How do you get something like a 50% cost reduction? Is that automation or de or buying bigger purchase orders deeper in your supply chain or is there just like a cost curve that's coming down and the price of motors is just dropping and you're just a beneficiary of that? Like what what's driving cost savings on the vehicle?

There are a lot of things. I mean first of all uh the best part is the is no part the part that you delete. And we were able to delete a lot of parts on this aircraft relative to the previous version. We we, you know, we've been able to um

yeah, deleting things is the best way to, you know, the the most reliable part, the part that never breaks is the one that isn't on the aircraft at all.

Um we've also been able to redesign a lot of parts and fundamental subasssemblies on the aircraft to make them easier to manufacture or just less expensive from a component perspective. And then finally, Zipline now has enough scale with a lot of these suppliers that yeah, as you said, you know, you can get much better deals um on on a lot of these key components. And so all of those things add up to um just a vehicle that's significantly less expensive.

Are they also getting quieter over time? I've seen some incredible demos of drone rotors and and propellers that they're shaped in a certain way and they're way quieter. Uh is there progress there? or is that happening in like physics labs and then it gets implemented? Are you doing the research? What's going on acoustically?

So yeah, zipline I mean we've always had this attitude that like this technology can only scale if it is quieter, more serene

for neighborhoods than the traditional delivery mechanisms of cars. And so, you know, Zipline has a big team of aerodynamics engineers and aerodynam aerero acoustics engineers who have been focusing on this question of like how do you design something that's really really quiet for the last 5 years. And by the way, you can't planes aren't like cars where you can just put a muffler on the back of it and make it quieter. Like the the design of the aircraft

has to be from the ground up made with aerero acoustics in mind. Zipline is, despite the fact that we operate bigger, more complex vehicles, Zipline is six times quieter

than the next closest competitor when we're making a delivery to someone's home. And we'll actually make significant improvements to the aerodyam aerero acoustic profile of the vehicle this year. We actually think we're going to get about another 8 dB of improvement this year, which for non-engineers, you know, think of 8 dB as being like about half as loud to the human ear. So having again um

that's awesome. Um what about uh congestion as you scale? How much of the routing is proprietary software uh maybe on your network sort of your own flight control interfacing with more national level flight control or even just like on the actual drone just cameras saying oh there's some random object over there that I need to steer away from. I mean, all of these, you know, Zipline has a a huge autonomy team that is responsible for not just how these vehicles route themselves to go and make deliveries, how they navigate the physical world because we're flying at about 400 ft.

Um, but also how we a how we detect and avoid other air traffic. And there are many different layers of zip lines air traffic control.

Um,

well, detect and avoid system. We work closely with air traffic control. We build um you know we're essentially building in partnership with the FA a new version. It's called unmanned traffic management

or how you manage thousands soon to be tens of thousands of vehicles. But in the long run you know we're already used to our cities being full of these like

loud dangerous polluting vehicles creating tons of traffic driving around in our neighborhoods.

Yeah.

Small 50 lb vehicles that are silent and electric are going to be way better for neighborhoods. are way less um you know they're they're less like obtrusive. People generally don't notice them. I mean we do a lot of deliveries to people's homes where they didn't even realize the delivery happened.

Mhm. Do you have a timeline for me or you actually getting into an EV tall and the the the true flying car vision? Maybe it's not like like let's say Whimo level adoption of a human in a in a vertical takeoff and landing. Not a helicopter, not a single rotor, not a plane, but something like that. Are we five years away from that longer? Is there something fundamental? Because this has been something that's been promised and I've been excited about my entire life and it feels like there's a lot of serious companies working on it, but we're not quite there yet. How are you thinking about that market? Uh, generally,

I'm also really excited and it's a question that I'm very interested in. Yeah,

I think that I think a lot of the technology has made probably faster progress than people realize like these vehicles that achieve that are electric vertical takeoff and landing fixed wing hybrids that like achieve a lot of the core performance characteristics. I think two challenges that I would point out. One is on the autonomy side. Like those companies are still putting human pilots in the cockpit. And it's not going to be like Uber if you have to hire an FAA certified pilot to come

do your Uber ride to get you to work in the morning like that's doesn't scale. It's a little too expensive. Yeah.

Um

so I think from an autonomy perspective,

who is going to design that autonomy layer? It's always seemed kind of obvious to me that the company that does that is going to do billions of autonomous deliveries delivering non-human things before you want to carry humans. I think humans will be more comfortable with that.

The other thing I would kind of point out is a huge part of this actually has to do with like integration which is like you can totally do the flight. There are vehicles again flying those kinds of mission profiles today. But where are you landing? I mean there are no helports in cities. They are getting shut down rather than built. And I think that it's all about the it's all about integration. You know, if you want to get design a vehicle that is more than just like a uh an electric version of a helicopter that can do like 20% of missions that a normal helicopter can do. I think if you're really talking about flying car, the key is to solve the integration problem. Like

can you actually get picked up directly from your home and delivered directly to your office for your daily commute? That's the core question.

Yeah. What at what point do you think courier like having a courier feature will make sense? This is top of mind. I I left my laptop at home Monday and I felt that it was super silly that I just like I was I ended up having to like use Uber Courier and you're using car for just one little laptop. Made no sense. I was I was thinking about you guys. It feels like an edge case. It's like not really

It's not a big market.

It's not a big market.

Yeah. What's the thinking around it?

Well, I think you might be surprised. I mean I, you know, similar for what I just said, you know,

with flying cars, integration is the thing that Zipline is most focused on. You know, we're launching all these amazing new partners. I mean, you know, a lot of the statistics that we're seeing in in the city is

if you look at Dallas, I mean, there are municipalities in Dallas where more than 50% of homes are ordering from zipline. We had an all-time new record on Sunday. Uh we blew away the previous record by 25% which had been set a week previously. Yeah.

And we had 10% of all homes in a municipality place an order with zipline on Sunday.

Wow.

Was that was that football? Is that like does that spike with like football? Is it

a holiday weekend? But you know these are like shocking statistics. I mean, we have, you know, a lot of the restaurants that we serve, Zipline is a huge percentage, a a majority of deliveries happening from those restaurants today.

And so, I think that, uh, you know, the usage is way different than what we were originally expecting. Um,

and the key is integration. You know, we want to be able to add so many different, and this is why we announced zipping points. This is a really simple new kind of ground infrastructure that we can install for free next to any partner whether it's a hospital, health facility, retailer, restaurant, or even eventually someone's home. You know, you can almost just think of it like a new kind of mailbox for autonomous logistics.

Do you think you'll be able to put a camera on them such that you can scan an ID so that you can deliver alcohol?

Um, we will do that. You don't need a camera on the vehicle. What you actually need is you just you need a camera on the person's phone. Okay,

that's the way that a lot of this delivery works today. They'll basically be able to place an order. They'll be able to use their phone to upload a picture of their ID and we can deliver um and then you can basically require signature on the phone itself. Okay. In the exact same way that it works for UPS or FedEx, we can deliver, you know, I mean, today from a lot of our partners, you know, we deliver over a 100,000 SKs. I mean, people are ordering Legos and like weird little nozzles for a gardening hose and birthday cakes and rotisserie chickens and prescriptions.

That's a crazy It's everything.

I I I I don't trust a normal delivery a human delivery driver with a birthday cake. That could go disastrously wrong. So yeah, the flight automated systems are Yeah, exactly. Or like look, automated systems aren't going to eat significant percentages of the food, you know, before it's delivered, too. There's [laughter] also

there's also way less safety risk. You know, I think it's very similar to Whimo where, you know, a young woman who like suddenly looks up from her phone in a, you know, in a ride share and is like, "Where the heck did my driver just drive me to?" Yeah,

you know, people have similar similar experiences with delivery where it's like someone's looking over your shoulder like are you home alone tonight? A lot of these like service a lot of these kinds of services it is much safer to have automated systems that are supervised by humans.

Mhm. uh you know pro serving serving people and um you know by the way what what we are observing is it's like there really is no comparable like when we look at the frequency of customer ordering right now uh you know you there are lots of lots of people who are ordering from zipline every single day

and so I think it's this is not something that you see with traditional instant logistics you see it once you make it 10 times faster half the cost and zero emission

well congratulations thank you so much for I And I every time you come on, I can't wait for more people to experience it because given given the the you know how focused you are in in, you know, places like Dallas, it's I think it's one of those things like Whimo where you have to experience it [clears throat] until you can really uh realize that the future's here. So, congrats. Uh

but you guys,

yeah,

I have a surprise for you,

please.

Someone's here auditing. One of your guys' sponsors is here on [laughter] Empongor for TVPN. I'm telling him about the oral farming benefits. TVPN top tier sponsorship [laughter] lambda lambda lightning round. [laughter] the Lambda Cloud in Lambda and he's uh and and uh and he's he's really we're just been grinding it out in the hardware founders complex coordination business and we just punched people in the face really hard. [laughter]

Are you are you delivering

said he was so pleased with this interview that he's going to be quadrupling down on the partnership with [laughter] me

of their advertisement. Good to see you guys.

Teleportation as a service.

Yes.

Yeah. Are you getting uh hopefully you're getting if those GPUs need to get to the data centers faster, hopefully they're they're flying in zip lines.

That's right. And you know, we'll eventually turn them into distributed uh

computes doing maybe a zipline will do this with Lambda. We have GPUs in all the aircraft.

That's amazing.

Amazing.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations again. Wish we were there. the awesome performance, overnight success. You got to hit him with the overnight success every time he comes on. [laughter] This man spent a decade in the 10 years in the making and now he's growing every day and doubling the business with incredible speed. Uh,

great stuff, guys.

We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

Cheers.

Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And without further ado, we will continue