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Zipline International is an American developer of unmanned aerial vehicles used to deliver vaccines, drugs and blood. The company's devices are focused on use in regions in which the level of development of medicine is at the lowest level. Zipline drones are capable of transporting up to 1.5 kg of blood on board (quite enough to save a person's life) for a distance of up to 150 km.
2019: Launch of the world's largest drone delivery network in Ghana
At the end of April 2019, Zipline announced the creation of the world's largest delivery network with drones that supply various medicines, vaccines and blood products to 2,000 clinics in remote areas of Ghana.
Earlier, Zipline began using preprogrammed drones with a range of 160 km and a speed of 110 km per hour to deliver blood to Rwanda. Thanks to a similar system, health workers received parachute packages within 30 minutes of placing an order using a text message. In December 2018, the company extended the agreement with Rwanda and entered into an agreement with Ghana, while moving from a simple distribution of blood products to more complex supplies of vaccines and plasma.
Zipline will deliver yellow fever, polio, diphtheria and tetanus vaccines, which are provided as part of the World Health Organization's immunization project. WHO will also use the company's delivery system for future mass immunization programs in Ghana.
Drones are the least complex part of the system. Most of the effort is spent on developing a coherent supply chain, integrating the project into national health systems and working with regulatory authorities, for example, civil aviation authorities in Rwanda. Nevertheless, Zipline plans to roll out a delivery system to the United States and Southeast Asia by the end of 2019. The company serves 22 million people a year in Ghana and Rwanda, but believes that it will be able to cover up to 100 million in such projects.
The government of Ghana is also not going to stop there: the project presented by the president includes a partnership not only with WHO, but also with the Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, the UPS Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Novartis and Pfizer.[1]
2016: Attracting investments of $25 million
In November 2016, it became known that Zipline raised an investment of $25 million. These funds will go to the development of technologies by the company and the development of new markets.
Investment funds Visionnaire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Subtraction Capital and several private investors have invested in Zipline. Taking into account this financial transaction, the total amount of funds raised by Zipline reached $43 million.
Having received money from investors, Zipline will spend it on the development of new quadcopters used to deliver medicines. In addition, the company plans to master new markets, including Indonesia and Vietnam.
As of November 2016, the project being developed by Zipline to deliver drugs using drones to hard-to-reach areas launched (in October) only in Rwanda. The service works as follows: the hospital, for example, makes a request to the blood bank, after which the operator installs the drone on the catapult, attaches a container with donated blood to it and sends the destination to the point by GPS coordinates. The flight time of the drone from the base to the place of blood transfusion does not exceed half an hour, and the cost of delivery in this way corresponds to the costs of transportation by car.
Zipline expects the company to make at least 150 blood deliveries to 21 provincial clinics in Rwanda. For this, up to 20 drones will be involved.[2]
Notes
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