Drone maker Zipline, on track for 1 million deliveries, adds vitamins, pizzas and prescriptions to cargo
Drone technology company Zipline, which rose to prominence flying critical medical supplies like blood bags and vaccines over rugged terrain in Rwanda, has seen the commercial side of its business boom. Deals with Walmart, and a new drone design, are making Zipline a bigger player in the world of retail and home delivery, and not only in hard-to-reach places.
On Wednesday, the company announced new delivery deals in the U.S., with nutritional supplement and wellness retail company GNC for Salt Lake City, and Seattle-area pizza chain Pagliacci Pizza for the greater Seattle metro area. Pagliacci and Zipline have created a new custom-designed pizza box to fit two 13″ pizzas and side dishes in Zipline drones. A third new deal is closer to its drone roots: with New York-based health-care logistics company Associated Couriers, it will offer patients at long-term care facilities across Long Island delivery of specialty prescriptions and medications.
A rendering of P2 Zips charging at a docking station.
Zipline
The deals are part of Zipline’s recent expansion into home delivery, which features its new drone platform, known as its P2 Zip, for what it says is nearly silent delivery, able to travel up to 24 miles each way from dock to dock to local communities, and can reach 99% of addresses in both urban and suburban areas at speeds much faster than traditional ground-based delivery.
Far from its first test cases in mountainous, rural setting regions, Zipline is set on dispelling the myth that the drones can’t work in high-density urban areas.
“When you mention urban, people always think of New York City and Chicago, but the reality is most of the cities in the United States don’t look like Manhattan or Chicago. They look more like Phoenix, Denver, LA, Houston, or Dallas. In those places, this technology can have a huge impact in terms of delivering ten times as fast, for half the cost, and at zero emission,” said Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Wednesday, after Zipline was ranked No. 25 on the 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
Zipline has made the CNBC Disruptor list four times.
Rinaudo Cliffton said that Zipline has already delivered in urban cities across the U.S. where people don’t expect this technology to start. Its first two distribution centers are in Charlotte, North Carolina and Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Walmart.
Zipline drone flights first began in 2016 to help with the national blood delivery network in Rwanda, and according to a study published in Lancet, it is an approach that can result in a reduction in blood waste of up to 67%.
Rinaudo Cliffton sees similar inefficiencies and waste, especially with carbon emissions, in the way deliveries are made today. Citing the four billion instant deliveries predicted to be made in the U.S. alone this year, he says the future will require more drone deliveries.
“We actually think it’s inevitable that this is going to shift towards systems that are quiet, less obtrusive, and actually good for the environment,” he said.
He added that there is a huge disconnect between the logistics network approach used for most deliveries and the size and weight of most packages in e-commerce, at under five pounds.
Early this year, Walmart announced that with partners including Zipline, DroneUp and Flytrex, it had grown to 36 drone delivery hubs across Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia, and has made 6,000 flights.
Last week, Zipline completed its 600,000th delivery and in just two years aims to operate more drone flights every year than most major U.S. airlines.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
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