Anshul Sharma

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. 🚀🌎

state of hard tech right now

Mayor Mamdani has snubbed the Horse Association of America, selling out to ‘Big Horseless.’

Actually the chronically negative you can identify in hiring and avoid The real damage to startups is done by 'Smart Skeptics' Who are smart, sound even smarter than they are, are great at raising objections, can hold great intellectual conversations, have a lot of anecdotal evidence about everything. But can't execute/move metrics/ solve hard problems even if their life depended on it, because they are skeptical about everything. And they dissuade the believers as well. Avoid them like a plague

The “Manipal Mafia” runs deep 👀 From Satya Nadella to a growing network of founders, operators and builders, @saxenasaheb shares why Manipal has produced so many entrepreneurial success stories. “I generally feel like people from the Manipal network are, to some degree of entrepreneurship from the very beginning because you’re constantly bringing people together. It’s a weird environment to live in, in a student town, and it shapes you in a particular way.”

Today, we announced a watershed deal to acquire three companies from @Boeing, @WiskAero , @Insitu_Inc, and @skygridai, in exchange for Boeing taking a strategic equity stake in @flyarcher and collaborating with us. After closing, our product portfolio will span piloted air taxis, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in Groups 2 through 5, purpose-built AI for aviation, and the vertical technology stack for autonomous flight. The mission is even bigger now. It’s time to build. archer.com/news/archer-to-sh…

I'm enjoying the DARPA Lift Challenge. We should do stuff like this all the time.

New kind of mailbox is rapidly rolling out for businesses. Enables teleportation-like delivery to any home. Drone delivery is now universal 🌎

Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart techcrunch.com/2026/03/27/wa…