The world’s largest drone delivery provider is planning a major U.S. expansion for 2026.
Zipline—whose drones deliver food, retail, healthcare, and other products to customers in Dallas-Fort Worth and Arkansas in as little as 30 minutes—on Wednesday announced plans to expand to Houston and Phoenix in early 2026. The company intends to use a freshly raised $600 million, also announced Wednesday, to launch in at least four new states by year’s end.
The expansion comes on the heels of a major milestone for Zipline—2 million global deliveries, which it estimated is more than all other drone delivery providers combined. For comparison, Wing, the drone delivery unit of Alphabet, has made just over half a million trips. Notably, the achievement comes less than two years after Zipline hit 1 million deliveries—a feat that took about eight years.
“The data that we’re seeing in just a single metro in the U.S. is mind blowing,” Keller Cliffton, CEO and co-founder of Zipline, told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “This has definitely gone from science fiction to completely normal and something people depend on day in and day out.”
New Horizons
Zipline’s core commercial operations are with Walmart in Dallas-Fort Worth, where it is among the operators pioneering the use of uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) traffic management (UTM) technology under an FAA authorization. The company on Wednesday said that since August it has added new DFW locations and thousands of customers every week.
Zipline received FAA Part 135 air carrier certification in 2023 and in 2024 was authorized to begin beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations outside the view of human personnel. It operates two different drone delivery systems—Platform 1 (P1) for long-range trips and Platform 2 (P2) for home delivery.
P1 drones, or Zips, can deliver up to 4 pounds of cargo while cruising at about 60 mph for 120 miles round trip, floating orders to the ground using a parachute. P2 Zips can carry up to 8 pounds over a radius of 10 miles, cruising at up to 70 mph and lowering orders using a tether. Unlike P1 drones, which operate in a hub-and-spoke model, P2 drones can fly between docks and reposition themselves in response to demand.
Customers in Houston and Phoenix will soon be able to use the service. But Zipline is just getting started. It said the $600 million raise, which included Fidelity Management & Research, Baillie Gifford, Valor Equity Partners, and Tiger Global Management, will accelerate its 2026 expansion.
“The last year has made it unmistakably clear that when deliveries are faster, cleaner, safer, and cheaper, demand isn’t just high, it grows exponentially,” Cliffton said in a statement Wednesday. “In 2026 autonomous logistics will become an everyday staple for people across several states in the U.S.”
Zipline was tight-lipped about which states those might be. But it has previously announced plans to serve markets including Salt Lake City, Seattle, Cleveland, Long Island, New York, Jacksonville, Florida, and Rochester, Minnesota. The company’s headquarters and manufacturing facilities are in South San Francisco, with additional test facilities spread across the U.S.
Drone Explosion
Zipline on Wednesday said it is now valued at $7.6 billion, making it “one of the fastest growing AI and robotics companies in the world.” And the company has the evidence to back that up.
Upon launching in Dallas-Fort Worth, for instance, Zipline said it took about 10 weeks to reach 100 daily deliveries. But new DFW sites are hitting that milestone in as little as two days, it said.
“We have municipalities in Dallas where just on Sunday, 10 percent of homes placed an order with Zipline in the municipality,” Cliffton said on Bloomberg TV. “We have certain cities where more than 50 percent of homes are engaged Zipline customers. The service has been growing about 15 percent week over week over the last year.”
Zipline said it beat its third-quarter target for daily delivery volume, and it hit its fourth-quarter target about six weeks ahead of schedule. Median flight time, it added, is about three minutes.
In addition to surpassing 2 million deliveries, Zipline drones have now flown more than 125 million autonomous commercial miles, delivering more than 20 million items. Per the company, that translates to many lives saved in 2025 by taking cars off the road. Citing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it said U.S. drivers have a rate of about 100 injuries and one death per 120 million miles.
Zipline’s next million deliveries could come even faster.
In November, it secured a “pay-for-performance” agreement with the U.S. State Department that could award it up to $150 million over three years. The money will fund the construction of new hubs in African countries where Zipline drones are already flying—provided the company can obtain assurances from those countries that they will expand and support its services long term. Per Zipline, the project could triple its facility footprint in Africa and expand the network to 130 million people.
In September, the company announced plans to triple its manufacturing capacity to support the production of 15,000 drones per year.
