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Keller Rinaudo

CEO & Co-Founder, Zipline

Search every verified Keller Rinaudo interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, has recently discussed the company's partnership with Uber to scale autonomous drone deliveries on the Uber Eats platform, with a stated goal of reaching one million deliveries per day. In interviews, he described the partnership as a response to significant demand, noting that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi visited Zipline's factory and expressed interest in scaling the service. Rinaudo Cliffton said the company is working to rapidly open new factories and increase drone production to meet this demand, and he described the potential for drone delivery to expand the overall instant delivery market by being faster and less expensive than traditional methods. Rinaudo Cliffton also highlighted Zipline's operational history, stating the company has completed 140 million commercial autonomous miles with zero safety incidents and received regulatory approval from the FAA to fly beyond visual line of sight across the United States after a decade of operating outside the U.S. He noted that Zipline serves 5,000 hospitals and health facilities in Africa, where he said the company saves 17,000 lives per year and has contributed to a 51% reduction in maternal mortality. He has expressed optimism about the role of automation and robotics in building what he described as a "physical twin to the internet," while also commenting on the challenges of operating hardware in the real world, such as wildlife nesting in infrastructure.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“I think that the reality is you know on the demand side you know when Dara was here a couple days ago he mentioned he's like look the thing that Uber's always known about demand is that especially demand for instant delivery is that it is insatiable I thought yeah I mean it's true it's a good word and the reality is it sort of feels like you know you've accidentally put a straw into the Pacific Ocean sort of have thi”

“The problem is that as we've been scaling across some of these metros in the US, some big companies have been looking at what Zipline's doing, saying, 'Hey, like that would be very valuable infrastructure for our customers.' So, case in point, you know, you mentioned Uber and Dara, you know, showed up here four weeks ago, looked around the factory, talked to us about like we ran some numbers on a calculator and he wa”

“We announced this new strategic partnership with Uber to get to a million deliveries a day. You know, important to realize that that's actually, um, still a very small percentage of the total instant deliveries happening in the US today, let alone the fact that Dara and I both, um, are confident that delivering in a way that's 10 times faster and less expensive is ultimately going to lead to a big expansion of this o”

“What's happening this summer is the fully burdened unit economics of these systems is just now in the process of falling below the cost of using cars to deliver things. And so I think it is a cool moment that I think most people don't really realize. It's happening quietly. But you know, I think that this thing is happening in the next month or two that is going to have a big impact on the world and how the world loo”

“In December, we announced a $550 million partnership with the US State Department to expand the impact of Zipline's life-saving service across a lot of the countries where we're already operating. So with US aid being shut down, the US was really seeking like new ways of engaging in these countries and helping save lives in these countries, but they wanted to do it in a way that would accelerate the economies of thes”

“The big realization is man there are 5 and a half billion instant deliveries happening in the US every year right now just you know traditional delivery platforms and if you were to extend the customer behavior that we're observing in Dallas right now to the rest of the US there would be 50 billion instant deliveries happening the only way we're going to get that kind of scale and that kind of efficiency is through A”

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