On a blustery afternoon late last year, on the lawn just outside City Hall in Rowlett, Texas, a strange-looking craft cleared the trees just before me. It hovered overhead for a moment before lowering a second craft on a thin rope all the way to a parched patch of grass. The little, white thing deposited a brown paper payload, then rode its tether back up to its waiting mothership, which turned and left. The experience lasted less than 30 seconds.
This wasn’t some UFO experience. This was a Zipline drone delivery, out in the real world, and that payload was my lunch. It was just one of the two million such deliveries this company has made since 2016, carrying everything from household supplies in rural America to lifesaving vaccines in remote Africa. And soon, those drone deliveries will be coming to even more places.
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Uncrewed Evolution
Zipline is a California-based company that has only been slinging burritos and other items in the Lone Star State since 2025, but has been proving itself elsewhere in the world for nearly a decade now.
The company first started operations in Rwanda in 2016, delivering medical supplies in minutes to remote locations. Independent studies have shown the lifesaving nature of Zipline’s deliveries, making this the rare startup with a genuine feel-good story at its core.
In Africa, Zipline operates what it calls Platform 1, or P1, aircraft, fixed-wing, uncrewed machines that look like bigger versions of the toys your grandpa built out of balsa in the basement. Workers load four-pound payloads into the belly of these planes, then launch them into the sky via giant slingshot.
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