Today’s blog was contributed by Oyihoma Saleh from the Global Prosperity group.
Zipline illustrates a lesson common to many market-creating innovations: transformative change rarely starts with technology. It begins with understanding who is struggling, why they are struggling, and designing a system that helps them make meaningful progress.
This is the essence of Jobs to Be Done theory: people “hire” products and services to help them make progress toward a goal, and “fire” these solutions when they do not serve them well. It is progress, not novelty, that drives adoption.
Drones demonstrate this dynamic well. In wealthy markets, companies like Amazon experimented with drones to speed up deliveries through its Prime Air program, launched in 2013, which promised 30‑minute delivery for small packages. A decade later, the service remained limited to only a few pilot sites, not just because of regulation, but because consumers already enjoyed fast, inexpensive, and reliable ground delivery. Drone delivery offered more novelty than meaningful progress, and without strong demand pull, regulators had little incentive to accelerate adoption.
However, under very different circumstances, Zipline used the same technology to chart a completely different growth path by identifying and innovating around an urgent Job to Be Done—delivering vital medical supplies across Africa.
Uncovering the Job to Be Done in nonconsumption
In 2014, Zipline founder Keller Rinaudo spent time in a Tanzanian hospital studying how clinicians tried to get urgent medical supplies to patients. Health workers used a simple mobile alert system to text the government whenever they ran out of blood, vaccines, or medicines. The system revealed huge demand, but the government had no practical way to respond. Reaching remote facilities meant crossing rough, unpaved roads that turned to mud in bad weather. Motorbikes and trucks took hours or days to cover short distances. Air transport was prohibitively expensive, and overstocking every clinic led to systemic waste as products expired unused. The result was devastating: thousands of patients died because the last-mile of delivery failed them.
Last-mile logistics account for about 40% of total logistics costs and are often the most expensive and inefficient step in medical supply chains in low- and middle-income countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 720 million people live in rural areas, yet only 34% have access to all-season roads and reliable, affordable transport, compared with about 70% in middle-income countries such as India and nearly 100% in high-income countries like the U.K. This gap drives severe waste. For instance, Rwanda historically reported 30% wastage of blood products, versus 6.6% in India and 3% in the U.K., and spent $50,000 annually just to dispose of expired blood.
Confronted with this reality, Rinaudo came to see an urgent Job that frontline health workers and their ministries were struggling to get done: “ensure that essential medical supplies reach patients quickly and reliably, even in the most logistically challenging environments.”
Redesigning the experience
By focusing on the circumstances of health workers and governments, Zipline treated drones as just one part of a broader service that institutions could “hire” to make progress. The aim was to create an experience of getting critical supplies to patients that was simple for clinicians, dependable under pressure, and credible to public officials.
Functionally, the company redesigned the ordering and fulfillment experience to remove friction for already overstretched health workers. Orders could be placed via basic SMS or WhatsApp, avoiding complex systems, while Zipline’s team pick, pack, and launch an aircraft with the supplies in under 10 minutes. To ensure reliability regardless of the environment, they built fixed-wing drones capable of flying long distances in difficult weather. By automating takeoff and landing, they eliminated the need for scarce, highly trained pilots, and lightweight parachutes allowed supplies to be dropped from the drone at clinics without runways or specialized ground equipment.
Zipline further supported the clinician’s emotional need for certainty by integrating real-time confirmations and live tracking. This provided essential reassurance in high-stakes moments, letting health workers know that help would typically arrive within 15 to 45 minutes.
To shift the perception of drones from a futuristic gadget to health infrastructure, the company presented itself as a medical logistics partner and used white aircraft marked with red crosses to signal humanitarian purpose and public service. This helped public officials see the service as part of a modern health system, rather than a trial of new technology.
Integrating around the Job
In 2016, the Rwandan government partnered with Zipline to launch the world’s first national drone delivery network for medical supplies. But delivering this experience reliably, and at national scale, required more than an aircraft. Zipline had to build an entirely new value network aligned around the Job.
The company embedded itself in Rwanda’s health infrastructure, and worked with the Civil Aviation Authority to create a regulatory sandbox that replaced restrictive rules with performance-based regulation, enabling safe, nationwide beyond‑visual‑line‑of‑sight (BVLOS) operations and making oversight part of its operating network. It also introduced a pay-for-performance national service model—“Deliveries as a Service”—so governments paid only when life-saving products actually reached patients, lowering upfront costs and risk for the public sector.
Zipline built centralized “Nests”—hybrid distribution hubs that combined medical-grade warehousing with automated airports capable of handling up to 500 flights per day and integrated directly with the National Center for Blood Transfusion so the national blood supply sat at the launch sites. This setup eliminated handover delays and cold-chain failures that had plagued road transport, and by training Rwandan engineers and flight operators to manage the system end to end, Zipline strengthened institutional trust and the operational resilience of the national health system.
Finally, by integrating its digital systems with the Ministry of Health’s procurement databases, Zipline gave officials near real-time visibility into stock levels, helping them reduce stockouts and cut facility-level blood waste by 67%, moving the nation closer to a truly just-in-time supply chain.
Zipline’s impact
Zipline, now valued at $4.2 billion, has grown into the world’s largest drone delivery network, serving over 5,000 health facilities and an estimated 45 million people across Africa, the US, and Japan. In 2025, the U.S government awarded the company $150 million to help triple its African operations, signaling growing recognition of drone delivery as essential public health infrastructure. Zipline has completed more than 1.8 million autonomous deliveries with a zero-incident safety record and employs about 1,300 people globally, including over 500 local hires in Africa. In Rwanda, it now delivers more than 75% of blood products used outside Kigali, and studies in the country have linked its services to a 51% reduction in postpartum hemorrhage deaths and improved vaccine access for frontline providers.
By solving a problem that had long gone unanswered, Zipline turned drone delivery from a novelty into essential health infrastructure and created a new market for on-demand medical logistics that is driving real transformative change by strengthening institutions, creating jobs, and accelerating national prosperity.
