Zipline Lands $1.5B Funding At $21.5B Post-Money Valuation

Zipline announced a $1.5 billion raise on November 5, 2026, at a $21.5 billion post-money valuation to fund a nationwide U.S. drone-delivery network, expand manufacturing and increase hiring.

Paradigm, WCM Investment Management and Layer Global led the raise, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Uber, Tiger Global, J.P. Morgan, ARK Invest and Salesforce Ventures.

Walmart and Zipline are working together to launch 300 additional sites under a new national, multi-year agreement that Zipline says has potential to grow further. Uber is targeting one million deliveries a day with Zipline by 2029. The Walmart agreement adds planned physical locations, while Uber’s figure is a future volume objective rather than a measure of current activity.

Merchant Results Behind the Expansion

Zipline says hundreds of businesses are growing revenue through its orders, with dozens of new businesses joining the network weekly and existing partners expanding to hundreds or thousands of additional locations. Wonder is separately building new storefronts and kitchens optimized specifically for Zipline delivery, connecting the network’s growth to changes in merchant infrastructure.

For a cohort of its longest-tenured restaurants that shared results, Zipline reports that its share of their delivery revenue increased from 10.8% to 34.9% between March and October 2026. Their delivery GMV rose 26%, with 80% of that increase coming from Zipline orders, and the Zipline orders did not reduce demand from other platforms. That distinction is central to the expansion case: the company is presenting drone delivery as a way to enlarge merchant demand, not only to shift existing orders between platforms.

Zipline says only 5% of U.S. restaurant orders are for delivery. In practice, cost and travel times constrain those orders to customers within a couple of miles of a store. Its drone service delivers without adding road traffic and is intended to help businesses reach more customers.

Delivery Performance and Production Scale

Zipline reports more than one million deliveries within the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex alone in 2026. In October 2026, the median Zipline order arrived 19 minutes after checkout, compared with 30-plus minutes for traditional delivery. Among restaurants with quick preparation times, the median bakery order arrived 10 minutes after checkout. Because those measurements begin at checkout, they cover the merchant’s preparation process as well as the delivery itself.

Ten years after its first flights, Zipline reports that it has flown 150 million commercial autonomous miles without a safety incident and that its long-range medical deliveries help save more than 14,000 lives each year across multiple continents.

The next-generation aircraft is designed to fly higher and more quietly while carrying heavier orders over longer distances. That design direction connects directly to the manufacturing component of the raise: Zipline is pairing expanded production facilities with an aircraft intended for larger orders and longer routes. No quantified performance specifications accompanied those design goals.

The national buildout now depends on turning those commercial plans and early merchant results into repeatable operations across more markets. Walmart’s (WMT ) planned site rollout and Uber’s volume objective provide forward milestones, while the manufacturing investment links network growth to Zipline’s ability to produce and deploy aircraft at the same pace.