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

South San Francisco startup Zipline is adding former Tesla and Waymo execs to its C-suite, and bringing on a former Uber executive to lead its commercial expansion, as the company scales its drone delivery service into new U.S. and international markets.

Since Zipline started up about twelve years ago, its fully electric, autonomous drones have been used to make more than 2.5 million commercial deliveries. The drones can carry items weighing up to 8 pounds. They have been used to deliver everything from life-saving vaccines, blood and anti-venom doses, to burritos and personal pizzas. Customers generally order via 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 over 100 small businesses.

The company’s CEO and co-founder Keller Rinaudo Cliffton estimates that Zipline is now making one drone delivery every 20 seconds, up from one per minute in early 2025 when Zipline ranked at No. 46 on CNBC’s annual Disruptor 50 list.

One million of its deliveries to-date were conducted within the last 12 months, the company said, and roughly 70% of its daily delivery volume takes place in the U.S.

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

Rinaudo Cliffton is fond of saying Zipline works to make orders for delivery feel as effortless as “teleportation.” Its fastest order-to-delivery time has been about five minutes for some orders in Dallas.

With the company’s newest healthcare partner, Cleveland Clinic, Zipline will be offering “healthcare home delivery service” in a suburb of Cleveland this month, allowing patients to get prescriptions flown to their homes, at no additional cost to start.

Joining the venture-backed startup as its new chief financial officer this month is former Tesla vice president of finance, Sendil Palani.

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

Zipline also has the potential to eliminate traffic congestion and pollution associated with traditional deliveries by air and on the ground, Palani said, while saving human and animal lives with its rapid deliveries, which can be made over damaged roads in the aftermath of extreme weather or other disasters.

Today, Zipline has the capacity to make 24,000 drones per year at its South San Francisco factory. Palani, who started at Tesla when the company was making just one, fully electric vehicle per day, sees analogies to the years when Tesla started mass-manufacturing its entry level Model 3 sedans.

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

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

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

The startup has 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 to Austin, Houston, and Cleveland, it has not yet revealed its next U.S. markets. “We are expecting just the U.S. business to grow by another 15X this year,” Rinaudo Cliffton said, adding “many tens of metros across the U.S. and some new, large international markets” in 2027.

While Zipline has the most traction by far in the U.S., it faces competition from Alphabet’s drone division Wing, fellow startups like Flytrex and Matternet, and others developing cargo-carrying drones for military use.

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

“It’s at a crazy inflection point,” Rinaudo Cliffton said. “This thing that we were working on for 12 years that everyone thought was totally weird and was never going to work is now becoming totally normal. Everybody is realizing it doesn’t make sense to have a 3,000-pound gas-powered, combustion engine vehicle and a person deliver something to your house that weighs five pounds.”