Zipline snaps up another $200M to fuel its drone delivery expansion

Summary

U.S. autonomous drone delivery and logistics startup Zipline has raised another $200 million, adding to a recent funding round originally announced in January. “Things have moved a little faster than we expected,” founder and CEO Keller Cliffton said in a video message posted on X that provided a broader update on the company. The additional funds, which included participation from crypto investment firm Paradigm, has pushed Zipline’s recent Series H round to $800 million. Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Valor Equity Partners, and Tiger Global participated in the initial tranche that valued the drone delivery startup at $7.6 billion. Zipline has developed a drone delivery ecosystem that includes the aircraft, launch and landing systems, as well as logistics software. The company, founded in 2014, got its start in Africa, where it used its autonomous drones to deliver blood in Rwanda. Zipline has expanded its reach and what its drones are used for in the years since. Today, its drones deliver food, retail, agriculture, and health products in five African countries, several cities in the United States, and Japan. The funds are being used to accelerate Zipline’s expansion to at least four U.S. states this year. The company has announced Houston, Phoenix, and Seattle as new markets. Zipline has seen considerable growth in a home delivery service that launched last year in the United States, Cliffton said in the video, noting that delivery volume growth beat its forecast in January and February. “We’re actually expecting to accelerate our growth over the next three months, relative to 2025,” he added. Cliffton said the growth was being driven by customers using the drones multiple times a day and to make larger orders. Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 “In the last three weeks, we’ve actually seen the average amount of stuff per basket increased by more than 20% with customers ordering all the time from Zipline,” he said, a...