Zipline marks 10 years of drone delivery with more than 3 million deliveries

Zipline/Platform 2 (P2)

Zipline, the drone-delivery company, marks ten years since its first flights in Rwanda in October 2016. It says it has now made more than 3 million deliveries and flown 140 million autonomous miles worldwide. The original Rwanda service carried blood to clinics, and the company is now also flying from Côte d'Ivoire and operating in the US.

• At launch, 15 fixed-wing aircraft served 21 transfusing clinics in western Rwanda, with up to 150 emergency flights a day.
• Zipline says delivery time to users has fallen from more than two hours to about 40 minutes.
• A peer-reviewed Rwanda study found a 51% drop in in-hospital deaths among mothers with postpartum haemorrhage at drone-served hospitals.
• Côte d'Ivoire's health ministry signed an eight-year public-private partnership; Zipline says more than 2,000 lives have been saved there.
• Some figures on Zipline's anniversary page are not backed by a published study, and a reported $20 billion valuation is unconfirmed.