CEO & Co-Founder, Zipline
Zipline CEO on State Department deal: A big transition toward commercial diplomacy
Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Zipline founder and CEO, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss details of the company's deal with the State ...
About Keller Rinaudo
Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, has been discussing the company's expansion and the economics of drone delivery. In December 2025, Zipline announced a $550 million partnership with the U.S. State Department to expand its delivery service across countries where it already operates. Cliffton said the U.S. was seeking new ways to engage in these countries and help save lives while accelerating local economies and benefiting the U.S. economically. He also stated that the fully burdened unit economics of Zipline's systems are falling below the cost of using cars for deliveries, a shift he described as happening "quietly" in the summer of 2026. Cliffton has emphasized that Zipline's drone is only about 15% of its autonomous delivery system, with the rest encompassing inventory management, air traffic integration, and engineering systems such as a dual flight computer failover protocol. He noted that Zipline has flown 140 million autonomous miles with zero safety incidents. Cliffton has also described the company's goal as approximating teleportation, saying that if a logistics system automated delivery and reduced the cost to near zero, it would fundamentally change how people live. He projected that Zipline expects to grow to a million deliveries a day in the next couple of years, while noting that even at that scale, the company would still serve a tiny percentage of the overall market.
Transcript (12 segments)
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Host0:08
Welcome back to Squawk Box. I want to get back to our discussion about drone delivery with Keller Rinaudo Clifton. He is the founder and CEO of Zipline. We were so sadly interrupted by technological problems. But you're in the technology business. You know about this, Keller. Help us understand. You were talking about the advance here of what's possible with this money. I think one of the big questions that people have is this is really one of the first grants being made in a post-DOGE world by Marco Rubio, State Department. How did this all happen?
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Keller Rinaudo0:41
Yeah, I think this is a big transition both for the administration and for the United States. We've been spending about $40 billion a year in foreign aid over the last 30 or 40 years straight. And the reality is that when you listen to countries and the US's allies, especially in the developing economies, they've been saying for a decade that they want trade, not aid. They don't want cost-plus government contractors providing services for free. They don't want to be treated as charity cases. Instead, they want technology, entrepreneurship, high-paying jobs. They want to turbocharge their economies and leapfrog into the future. So I think this is a big transition toward commercial diplomacy, where the US can be deploying AI and robotics infrastructure into these countries. That's really good for the country because it's going to save lives and save money. But it's also good for the US because we're going to secure US technology and manufacturing leadership for the decade to come.
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Host1:40
And I was going to ask how much of this is still a laboratory for you in terms of building this out and scaling this here in the United States and elsewhere around the world?
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Keller Rinaudo1:51
It's funny, you know, people always when Zipline launched in Africa, people always said, okay, it's like a laboratory to make this work in the US. I think that's maybe not fair to all of these different government partners that have honestly scaled autonomous delivery massively to a degree that I think people don't even realize. I mean, today, Zipline serves 5,000 hospitals and health facilities globally. It saves about 17,000 lives a year, predominantly moms and kids. And it's become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth, with over 125 million commercial autonomous miles. That said, to your point, the service is also growing in the US really fast. I mean, the US has sort of been playing fast follower here. In fact, just yesterday we had an all-time new record of deliveries in the United States. We did more commercial deliveries in the US yesterday on a Tuesday than we did across all the other countries we operate in the world combined. So the US is growing really fast. But look, the US is a fast follower rather than all these African countries being labs, in my opinion.
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Host2:51
And just so we understand. So you said more deliveries yesterday in America than everywhere else. How many deliveries can you do in a day at this point?
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Keller Rinaudo3:02
We're now in the high thousands of deliveries per day. And the crazy thing is we've been observing. So Zipline flies globally. We're doing a delivery about every 30 seconds. We'll soon be at a delivery every second. Right now, over the last 30 days in the US, the business has been growing about 15% week over week, which is a little bit crazy. And in some of the neighborhoods we're serving right now, we've mainly scaled in Dallas. We'll be announcing our next two metros next month. But right now, delivering for all these amazing partners like Walmart and Chipotle and Cleveland Clinic and many others, we are seeing customers ordering like 3 to 8 times per month. They order more than an Amazon Prime subscriber uses Amazon Prime. It saves tons of time because delivery typically happens in under 15 minutes, and the service has a net promoter score of 94-95. Right now, in some towns we're serving in the US, we have like 46% of homes ordering via Zipline. So the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed.
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Host4:08
So you may not want to or be able to answer this. The cost of delivery in the US is what relative to somebody who's delivering something by Federal Express or UPS? I clearly understand that the cost basis for delivery, for example, in Rwanda, can be extraordinarily helpful given the amount of distance that you often have to travel and you're able to bring this to small towns and little villages all over. Are the same economics available in the US?
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Keller Rinaudo4:42
I would say in the US the economics are even better just because labor is very expensive here and the amount of money that people want to be paid per hour is only going up. And that's a good thing. Humans should be paid more money over time. The reality is, it's probably an area where people haven't realized how far the technology has already come. I mean, it is already less expensive to do a delivery in this way than doing a similar delivery using a car. We're not usually comparing ourselves to UPS and FedEx. Those are very slow deliveries. We're usually comparing ourselves to more of the instant delivery industry. But there are going to be 5.5 billion instant deliveries in the United States this year alone. And we're using a 4,000-pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human to deliver something, you know, food or a prescription or whatever that weighs less than 5 pounds on average. So it's actually a bizarre way of solving the problem. We think it's inevitable that there's going to be a big transformation toward automated logistics.
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Host5:38
And that's what I was going to ask next is you mentioned 5 pounds. What is the weight limit at this point in terms of the scale of a delivery?
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Keller Rinaudo5:48
It varies. Today we're across most of our sites delivering up to five and a half pounds. The system is designed to deliver up to 8 pounds, will be there soon. And in the long run we think 10-15 pounds. That enables you to capture something like 98 or 99% of the delivery market in the US. So we're not going to be delivering flat screen TVs in this way anytime soon. But the vast majority of stuff that's going via car can go via this new modality.
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Host6:14
And before we go, then you got me thinking about the DoorDash of the world, the Uber Eats of the world, things like that. Do they ultimately plug into your system in the way that they want to plug into autonomous vehicles? Do you end up usurping them in restaurants and other delivery companies will just plug into you directly? How do you see that?
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Keller Rinaudo6:36
I'm not really an expert with regard to what any of the other big platforms are going to do. Right now, this is all happening through the Zipline app, which is sort of remarkable. I mean, people are able to open up this app, shop with tons of different amazing brands, they can order whatever they want and then have it delivered to their home 10 to 15 minutes later from when you click to when the thing is delivered. And usually delivery is only taking 2 to 4 minutes. So especially for food or even for a prescription or some kind of medicine that you need quickly, it's just game changing. Like food tastes better, you can get things delivered really, really quickly, even when you don't want to leave the house. I would say what we are observing, if you just extend the customer demand that we're observing across Dallas-Fort Worth today to the rest of the US, there would actually be 50 billion instant deliveries in the US, not five. So I think the big realization is if you actually make instant delivery affordable and reliable and safe, people are going to consume a lot more of it. They actually change their behaviors every day. And so I think that's awesome because it's going to save