Zipline adds ex-Tesla, Uber, Waymo execs as U.S. drone delivery scales

South San Francisco-based startup Zipline is adding former Tesla and Waymo executives to its ranks and hiring a former Uber executive to lead its business expansion as the company scales its drone delivery service into new U.S. and international markets.

Since Zipline began operations nearly twelve years ago, its all-electric, autonomous drones have been used to make more than 2.5 million commercial deliveries. Drones can carry items weighing up to 8 kilos. They’ve been used to deliver everything from life-saving vaccines to blood and anti-venom doses, from burritos to personalized pizzas. Customers typically order through Zipline’s app.

Little Caesars, Chipotle and Cleveland Clinic are among the U.S. businesses Zipline works with today, along with retail partners like Walmart and more than 100 small businesses.

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, the company’s CEO and co-founder, estimates that Zipline is now delivering one every 20 seconds instead of one every minute in early 2025, when it was ranked No. 46 on CNBC’s annual Disruptor 50 list.

The company said one million of its deliveries to date have been made in the past 12 months, with approximately 70% of its daily delivery volume occurring in the US.

This is a big change from Zipline’s early days, when it focused on drone delivery of medical essentials and humanitarian aid to clinics and farms in Rwanda and Ghana. Rinaudo said Zipline’s business in Africa is also growing, with ongoing development agreements and expansion, some with the help of the U.S. State Department.

Rinaudo Cliffton likes to say that Zipline is working to make delivery orders as effortless as “teleportation.” For some orders in Dallas, the fastest order-to-delivery time was about five minutes.

Zipline, with the company’s newest healthcare partner, Cleveland Clinic, will offer a “home healthcare delivery service” in a Cleveland suburb this month, allowing patients to have their prescriptions sent to their homes at no additional cost.

The venture-backed startup also includes former Tesla vice president of finance Sendil Palani, who joined this month as its new chief financial officer.

Palani spent nearly 17 years working for Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker and told CNBC that he sees Zipline as a similarly mission-driven organization, with related operations from precision manufacturing to maintenance of charging infrastructure.

Palani said Zipline also has the potential to eliminate traffic congestion and pollution caused by traditional air and ground deliveries, while also saving human and animal lives with rapid deliveries that can be made over damaged roads after extreme weather conditions or other disasters.

Today, Zipline has the capacity to produce 24,000 drones per year at its factory in South San Francisco. Palani, who started working at Tesla when the company was producing only one fully electric vehicle a day, sees similarities with the years when Tesla began mass production of its entry-level Model 3 sedans.

(Zipline’s former CFO was Deepak Ahuja, another Tesla finance leader who still advises the drone business and personally recommended Palani fill his shoes.)

In addition to the new CFO hire, Zipline is hiring Kevin Vosen as chief legal officer, who joins after a stint at agricultural biotechnology firm Ohalo and a seven-year stint as chief legal officer at Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle venture Waymo.

Rinaudo said strengthening its leadership team should help Zipline scale its services across the U.S. after gaining traction in its first major metropolitan area, Dallas, Texas, last year.

The startup also hired Allen Penn as head of commercialization and markets. Penn previously served as vice president of Uber Eats and helped build the company’s food delivery and international ride-hailing business.

While Zipline is expanding into Austin, Houston and Cleveland, it has yet to announce its next US markets. “We expect U.S. businesses to grow another 15x this year,” Rinaudo Cliffton said, adding “dozens of metros across the U.S. and some new, major international markets” in 2027.

While Zipline is by far the most popular company in the US, it faces competition from Alphabet’s drone division Wing and other startups flytrex And matternet, and others are developing cargo-carrying drones for military use.

Researchers at PwC predict that the U.S. drone market will grow 65% annually from 2024 to 2034, with deliveries rising from about 13 million this year to more than 800 million in 2034.

“It’s at a crazy crossroads,” Rinaudo Cliffton said. “This thing we’ve been working on for 12 years, which everyone thought was weird and would never work, is now completely normal. Everyone understands that it doesn’t make sense to have a 3,000-pound gasoline-powered, internal combustion engine vehicle and have one person deliver a five-pound thing to your home.”