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Skydio is announcing a $1.2B investment from Axon today. Axon is a special company: pioneering products, an optimistic vision of the future, an inclusive and thoughtful approach to building towards that future, and a truly special team. They have been an inspiration for me and Skydio on many fronts, and they have been an incredible partner in bringing the benefits of DFR to public safety. Axon is the only company I’ve encountered that I could see acquiring Skydio and having it actually work. Both companies seriously considered doing it. But we came to believe we can both be most useful to the world as independent companies. With this investment, we’re doubling down on a phenomenally successful product and GTM partnership. The vast majority of our state and local public safety business was already going through Axon and they will now become our exclusive reseller for US and Canada public safety. Similarly, Skydio becomes the exclusive drone Axon will sell in those markets. And the investment gives Axon a large and well deserved stake in the enormous upside of Skydio. Skydio didn’t need the money, so this is mostly going to provide liquidity for existing shareholders and employees - which I am equally excited about. What does this mean for our customers? It means Skydio remains a fully independent company (Axon is a minority shareholder and is buying non-voting stock) with the resources and mandate to continue making massive investments to build the flying robot infrastructure our civilization needs across all of the industries we serve from energy, construction, the military, transportation, and of course public safety. In public safety, this strengthens a partnership that has enabled us to reach and better serve thousands of agencies, and it opens up even more product-level collaboration. But we also remain committed to integrating and collaborating with any/every company we need to to deliver results for our public safety customers, including companies that Skydio and Axon may have competitive overlap with. We are charting a course to build one of the great physical AI companies of this century with civilization-scale impact.

Today, Zipline raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation. When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldn’t try. We started the company on a cow farm. We worked out of run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didn’t have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team. We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive. Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. We’re now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands. Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud “swarm of bees” delivering to their backyard or their neighbor’s. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery! Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. We’re starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, we’ve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer. Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didn’t think the company was “investable”. Most people didn’t even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined. There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where we’re going. 🚀🌎