US-based medical product delivery provider Zipline has raised $190m in funding from investors including internet technology conglomerate Alphabet, CNBC reported on Friday.
The money was secured over two rounds, including a $70m series C round closed in spring 2018, and backed by Alphabet subsidiary GV, investment bank Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Katalyst Ventures and Baillie Gifford.
Baillie Gifford returned for a $120m series D that also featured The Rise Fund, an impact investment vehicle formed by private equity firm TPG. The series D round was closed relatively recently, the report suggested, and Zipline is now valued at $1.2bn.
Zipline operates a medical product delivery service that relies on unmanned aerial vehicles to ship more than 170 different vaccines, blood products and drugs to rural clinics. It has completed more than 14,000 deliveries to date, using proprietary drones it assembles in California.
The company launched in Rwanda three years ago but has since expanded into Ghana. It was founded in 2011 originally as toy robot producer Romotive before pivoting to its current service in 2016.
The funding is being used to establish delivery hubs across 2,600 health facilities in Rwanda and Ghana by the end of 2019. It will also drive expansion efforts across Africa, South and Southeast Asia as well as the Americas, where Zipline has already secured regulatory approval in the US state of North Carolina.
Zipline has now raised $233m in funding. It closed a $25m series B round in 2016 that was led by venture capital firm Visionnaire Ventures and backed by fellow VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.
GV took part in a $12m round for the company in 2014 together with Felicis Ventures, Klein Venture Partners, Morado Venture Partners, Subtraction Capital, Sequoia Capital, Stanford University’s endowment fund and assorted private investors. Its earlier investors include Lerer Ventures, Paul Allen and Jerry Yang.
