Full Zipline Factory Tour: How a $7.6B Company Builds Drones

0:28Welcome to Zipline HQ. giant car factory that was right next to engineering for the first several years. We've just been approved by the FAA to now fly one human to 30 aircraft. We'll soon go well in excess of that. Humans aren't really flying the aircraft. You have a human overseeing a large fleet of autonomous vehicles. My snot. That's pretty advanced.

1:00Welcome to ZipLine HQ. You can see we're just about to cross 2 million total deliveries. Wow. Yeah, that'll probably happen in the next three or four days. All of these aircraft flying around that number, do you want to guess what those are? Active flights? Yeah, exactly. Really? Yep. So every one of those aircraft is out making deliveries somewhere in the world. Right now, most of the Africa business is slower. It's like middle of the night Africa time. But if you come in in the morning, you can like barely see that number. There's so many aircraft making deliveries. Wow. Yeah. Let's actually, speaking of seeing the aircraft making deliveries, Let's go check out the rock.

1:30What's the rock? There's a rock? The rock stands for a remote operating command center. I thought it was an actual rock this whole time. You what? I thought it was like an actual rock this whole time. No, I'm sorry. You guys are like, let's go see the rock. Okay, maybe there's like a - Are you a fan of rocks? I mean, we're in California. There's like people who love crystals. Maybe you guys love rocks. Do we seem like the type to be into energy crystals too? Definitely. Really? Yeah. We're an engineering company Molly. It's the opposite of that.

2:04Yeah, this is actually kind of a, you know, cool example by the way, you know, just getting a sense. So yeah, October 10th, that's what that space looked like where we were just standing. And then December 10th is a completely built out manufacturing facility. So this is all of Zipline HQ behind us. The zipline is about 1 ,300 people. We're about 800 people in the US, and more than half of those people are engineers. Everything from electrical engineering, firmware engineering, all different disciplines of software. So all of those teams are what you see behind us. Most of this column is actually the autonomy team.

2:38So responsible for machine learning, detect and avoid, computer vision, both on the zip as well as on the Droid. And then behind them is like a system systems test, embedded engineering, mechanical engineering, supplier industrialization engineering, and then over here is... You guys are gonna need a bigger office soon. Yes, in fact maybe you just saw something that we can't announce yet, but yeah. The zip line is soon gonna be expanding offices. This building actually used to be a Harley Davidson dealership. No way. Yeah, so they would actually do all of the maintenance of the bikes would happen downstairs and then upstairs they like had all the motorcycles this was like the showroom.

3:17What's his job?

3:21Very friendly. Emotional support. ZipLine you know it's a lot of tough days trying to build a company like ZipLine. Yeah come on in. Okay.

3:36This is my desk. This is your desk? Maggie, ZipLine's chief of staff. Hi. You're on camera? This is Molly. We have a lot of questions for you. Are you prepared? I'm just kidding. So this is mostly like powertrain, electrical engineering, more firmware engineering. This is the safety and reliability team over here. And yeah, if you want, we can go check out The Rock. Let's go check out The Rock. Yeah.

4:12So yeah, ROC stands for Remote Operating Command Center. This team is responsible for all flights happening everywhere in the US. We've just been approved by the FAA to now fly one human to 30 aircraft. We'll soon go well in excess of that. But essentially, humans aren't really flying the aircraft. You have a human overseeing a large fleet of autonomous vehicles, if that makes sense. You can see we track everything from uptime to the kind of cohort analysis of how quickly these sites scale. Zipline is now operating about 20 sites in Dallas alone. Each of those sites scales faster and faster. So it took us, I think, about 110 days to get our first site to 100 deliveries a day.

4:58We now have sites that hit 100 deliveries a day in two days. The sites are just scaling way, way faster. In some cities, we have over 50 % of homes ordering from Zipline. It's kind of insane. That's insane. More than half of all homes ordering from Zipline in some of the cities. Oh my gosh. That's crazy graph. Yeah, it's pretty cool. We're definitely in the vertical part of the curve. And then if you want to come a little closer, you can actually see these deliveries happening live. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

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6:18Start today at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery. So you can actually see, you know, there are there's one aircraft actually making delivery system Pea Ridge, Bentonville. So you can see all the different 20 sites are being tracked here. And we look in, you know, Pea Ridge, we can see two deliveries happening right now. So there's a zip, you know, in the northeast there. You can see a zip that's making delivery. Now it's on its way back. And it also looks like there's a zip that's outbound to make a delivery in the southwest. And then as more deliveries come in, we'll get to see packages get loaded into these aircraft, and then the aircraft take off and go make deliveries.

6:59So we might get to see that over the next two or three minutes here. You can also see all the other sites, and they almost all have deliveries that are happening right now. So yeah, that's a lot over there. Yep. A lot of these sites are, I mean, you know, we're right now, we're operating sites about 17 hours a day, we're soon I'm going to transition 24-7. It's kind of insane, you know, just getting to watch, like, the CCTV. And by the way, the system's growing 15 % week over week. So it's, you know, I'll go, like, two weeks without coming in, like, really, like, watching the rock. You come back two weeks later, it looks completely different.

7:32Like, the system is scaling so fast. Almost every two weeks, it's, like, a completely different level of scale that you can observe by watching these flights. So we'll actually get to see here probably in the next 60 seconds, you'll see a zip actually hover down and land into those docks. So all of this is controlled by this team. So one central control team for all aircraft in the U.S. Actually, sorry, there are two control centers. This is one of them. Oh, look, a new delivery was just placed. So see how the bullseye just appeared? Yeah, now down in the southeast. So that means that a zip has just been given a route.

8:10we'll probably see a zip take off here. I don't I didn't actually see it take off. So yeah, you give it maybe 30 seconds. We'll get we're probably gonna get to see a zip land here and a zip. Oh yeah, there you go. See top right that aircraft is taking off. Oh yeah. There it goes.

8:33So it's had its route automatically loaded onto it. Now you can watch it go out and make that delivery to the south to the southeast there's also a zip that is landing because we just saw it fly back right but we haven't seen it land so let's watch and we'll see we get to see a zip hover in and land but yeah i mean coming over and watching this is honestly you know it's a little bit mesmerizing because it's like these systems are just now operating for the public to watch maybe we should we don't have that today it's like a zoo camera yeah it's probably i know it's not a bad idea i wonder if there would be the googly eyes on them there there you go look there's a zip coming home after making a delivery.

9:08Cool. Yeah, we probably should do something like that. It's so fun to watch. Yeah, it's really fun. I would watch it just from home. Yeah. And keep in mind, we're watching the CCTV of one of the sites here where there are 20 other sites that are just cycling, yeah, 17 hours a day. Put the googly eyes on them, start naming them, and then all of a sudden you have a zoo. As cute as possible. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a good idea. I feel a lot of the powertrain teams are designing everything from battery management systems to the flight computer to the power distribution boards. And we actually design the electric motors from scratch.

9:39In fact, we can pick one up in a sec. So what you're looking at is HIDL. HIDL stands for Hardware in the Loop Simulator. Zipline has 140 million commercial autonomous miles with zero safety incidents. That's hard to do when you're constantly iterating on all the different aspects of software and hardware in the system. Right now, every six weeks, we're doing a major global software update to the entire fleet. typically that'll include like 60 bug fixes, 25, 30 performance improvements, plus a lot of major new features. All of that has to be really carefully tested before we put it on an airplane, right?

10:14And you do not want to like find out for the first time that a feature is failing by putting onto an aircraft and crashing it, even at a test site. Every one of these layers is, you can kind of think of it like the brain and nervous system of an airplane. So this is the battery, battery management system, cellular antennas, Wi-Fi antennas, flight compute, power distribution board, four electric motors, which are designed from scratch by Zipline, plus the red motor controllers you can see on top, winch motor controller, mixed motor controller. So the droid brain, this is actually an NVIDIA GPU running on that small cute robot that's actually, you know, controlling its own position when it's delivering to a house, plus the dock electronics.

10:51So that larger board is what's controlling that big hockey puck dock that's the landing station for the zip. So every one of these layers is an airplane. So, and every airplane is connected to a powerful simulator that is simulating a world for that airplane to fly around in. It's kind of like, think of them all as like dreaming, right? So you're surrounded by like 30 aircraft right now. They're all flying in the matrix. And we'll download all new software onto this fleet. We can cycle through tens of thousands of flights in simulation running on the actual flight avionics itself. We can typically catch 90 to 95 % of bugs and performance software problems here.

11:29Before we then go to the final layer of testing, which is the test site itself, where we're going to deploy onto real aircraft and fly at scale. Once we do tens of thousands of flights at the test site and everything's working perfectly, then we can do an over-the-air global update to the national fleet of that new software version. Kind of makes sense? Makes sense. Yeah. So this is all kind of, I mean, it's in the weeds, but this is a huge part of Zipline's competitive advantage. Like this kind of infrastructure, this kind of investment in testing and validation is how we move at a very high engineering velocity while still deploying a product that's super safe for the neighborhoods that we fly over.

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12:40So you're going to kind of see where we're building all of that. This is the current manufacturing line for EB3. So primary structures start here. This is all the structural strength way through the air. Oh my god! It's really like... Try to pull it apart. I can pull it apart. Yeah, try to break it. You might be able to break it. You slam it. But yeah, this is a sequel carbon fiber structure that comes out of the mold. It's kind of like using a process of sort of like injection living for carbon fiber. and it's a really really hard thing to design. It has to be obviously not just strong, it also has to be very rich.

13:26One thing you worry a lot about with an aircraft is you have to worry about you know whether you're exciting different different kinds of vibration and the aircraft can actually shake the aircraft apart. It's actually like one of the main failure modes for an airplane. So anyway, those primary structures basically come onto the line and immediately start routing bus bars and through the main primary structure. We then also installed the flight computer and the power distribution board, all different avionics. There are about 43 major sub-assemblies on each aircraft and about 700 unique components.

13:59So you can see a lot of the components that get assembled onto the aircraft is being used in these bins next to each substation. All of these are designed from scratch by ZipLine, we have a global supply chain. And as I mentioned a lot of those components are actually now manufactured here. So for example we can go see the battery welding line in a second. So it's kind of cool if we stop for a second. You can see the power distribution board, flight compute board. We've now run the wiring and the buck bar roof primary structure itself. So we're ready to plug in the electric motors. Also designed to move it from scratch by ZipLine.

14:35You can also see the, we call this the winch assembly. This is both the latch, the docking bin that basically latches into the dock, as well as the winch, use the bitters and muller the droid when making flippers, or when we're loading a package into the aircraft. But yeah, as we come down, all of the software, even the software, You can actually probably see on the screen here, even the software that controls all manufacturing instructions. Oh my god! That's pretty advanced. I'll click that. So all of those manufacturing instructions, all of Zipline's manufacturing software system is also built on scratch by Zipline.

15:19That might sound weird. You would think, oh, you probably use some kind of... Because there are plenty of companies that make software, like an MRP, it's clearly called. Oh, he's on the call with him? Yeah. So it's a weird thing to do, really like any other companies that do that, like I know of our Tesla and so set, but designing your entire operating system for the company, all the software that we use on the manufacturing floor, all the software that we use on the internet site, service center, all of that. Not only are we building all the software that runs on the aircraft, not only are we We're building the communications architecture, we'll give it where we can put Shannon.

16:00Also, we're facing app because of an app that people download the orders. We also build the unmanned traffic management system that provides the FAA. But after all that, we're also designing the operating system for the company itself, which is controlling supply chain, manufacturing, maintenance, logistics, everything else. Might seem like a weird or nuanced belief, but it's a really big enabler to what we do. So the other advantage of being in control of all that software is it allows us to have full track and traceability of every single component to this aircraft. That's a big component of our figure to our suit.

16:37If ever something goes wrong in the rear goal, we need to be able to identify local bonus sales, track that goes on into a specific batch, and then you should be able to know every single pilot aircraft besides it. You can quarantine if necessary, you can put that by the supplier and create a new kind of quality process. This is super important in terms of designing systems that are not just really cost effective, but they are also extraordinary. And at the end of the day, the zipline has run 140 mAh in the amount of small. It has zero tickets. If you were to drive 113 miles per car, even in a place like the US, you would have about 600 crashes, 100 injuries, and so much means 20 to catch.

17:24So not only is the goal to save lives, like the greener lives in modern places, but the goal is also to allow them to just have to fundamentally see the remote access.

17:39This whole building, you know, it's been a huge advantage, like very sort of similar to, you know, Tesla originally had Fremont, right? They had like a giant car factory that was right next to engineering for several years. This factory has been a huge advantage, like this building has been able to expand into more and more of it. It's just a huge advantage to have all of this stuff tightly integrated together. it allows us to be lightly fast. These are actually docks. This dock is the piece of hardware that we're installing on the towers themselves. I just posted something on X six days ago. It was like a new 12 dock tower design.

18:20I don't know if you saw that. I loved how I actually posted that. People were asking Grok, because I just said XGen, people were asking Grok, what is this? How does it work? And Grok was saying, don't worry, this is a CGI rhetoric of some kind of technology. So it's like, awesome. Because that's actually, you know, Grok is incorrect. That is, you know, that is operating in its real world today. But yeah, so these docks fall on touts. These are basic, like, superchargers for aircraft. The dock, so the aircraft's function below latches into the dock. The dock tees the aircraft. It charges the aircraft.

18:57it actually it was preconditioning the battery. It's actually a project that, depending on the temperature, it also uploads data on your ground network. Every place is centered over a gigabyte and a flight data and a limit rate is super useful to make all future flights safer. You saw on your all-in interview that people would go to their patients and touch them. Yeah, yeah, it's the thing. They'll bring their kids. Young kids will ask. They'll be like, where do you want to go? Do you want to go to the park? Do you want to go to the museum? Because they'll be like, I want to go to a zip line. So they'll drive to a parking lot and they'll sit and just watch the air.

19:36You don't have to start getting an ice cream stand. I know, I know. We need to be like selling swag. That could be another component of the business, you know, selling t-shirts and food. Kind of like the Tesla diner, you know, the supercharger. Yeah, it's a thing. Yeah, lots of batteries, weight, going to aircraft. And then this is a lot of droid manufacturing. So, you know, the droid is that smaller, cute robot that's actually controlling its position on X and Y axis when we're landing. It looks like the thing doing swimming. Yeah, a little like that. Yep. We kind of designed it to go a little inspired by like me from WALL-E.

20:14Yeah. Yeah, you want it to look cute and you want and it needs to exactly like you want it to it needs to be safe but just important it has to feel safe. Actually, when you see kids and families receiving deliveries from Zipeline you can tell they feel safe because it's quiet and this robot feels friendly is safe, it looks safe, kids feel comfortable being right next to it, grabbing the packages and kids go over. This is the reason, you know, people have this, like, concept in their head of, like, because some other companies are actually doing this, you're, like, descending this massive octopopter of, you know, sounds like a lawnmower of death, who was in, like, you know, 20 feet of you, it's like, you know, you're, you're, you're, like, incredibly loud, incredibly scary.

21:04It's actually super dangerous to have an aircraft of that size from that close to your house. And that's all insane. For this to actually work, you've got to have this as a better experience. It's more magical, quieter, safer than the way that you do that. The way you do that is making the main aircraft super quiet. And keeping it 100 meters in the air at all times. It's really cute robot like the droid. Have you thought of putting Disney eyes on it? Yeah, we have. I like the idea of doing like stickers on the front of having little like two little chip hunks like holding flight controls of like, you know, aviator goggles and things like that to make it look like two little chip hunks are controlling you.

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23:00It's a 470. It's a thousand cycles. This might look on fancy usage. Every single component. Just a crazy life cycle. So obviously in a delivery, that would lower 100 seconds. Right now we're obviously lowering 5 seconds. We're just testing a little bit more to see what fails. Every single one is 700.

23:28We will test in all different weather conditions. We will destructive test, vibration test.