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Jeff Bussgang, a co-founder and general partner at Flybridge Capital, recently wrote an Extra Crunch guest post that argued it is time for a refresh when it comes to the technology adoption life cycle and the chasm. His argument went as follows:

VCs in recent years have drastically underestimated the size of SAMs (serviceable addressable markets) for their startup investments because they were “trained to think only a portion of the SAM is obtainable within any reasonable window of time because of the chasm.”The chasm is no longer the barrier it once was because businesses have finally understood that software is eating the world.As a result, the early majority has joined up with the innovators and early adopters to create an expanded early market. Effectively, they have defected from the mainstream market to cross the chasm in the other direction, leaving only the late majority and the laggards on the other side.That is why we now are seeing multiple instances of very large high-growth markets that appear to have no limit to their upside. There is no chasm to cross until much later in the life cycle, and it isn’t worth much effort to cross it then.

Now, I agree with Jeff that we are seeing remarkable growth in technology adoption at levels that would have astonished investors from prior decades. In particular, I agree with him when he says:

The pandemic helped accelerate a global appreciation that digital innovation was no longer a luxury but a necessity. As such, companies could no longer wait around for new innovations to cross the chasm. Instead, everyone had to embrace change or be exposed to an existential competitive disadvantage.

But this is crossing the chasm! Pragmatic customers are being forced to adopt because they are under duress. It is not that they buy into the vision of software eating the world. It is because their very own lunches are being eaten. The pandemic created a flotilla of chasm-crossings because it unleashed a very real set of existential threats.

The key here is to understand the difference between two buying decision processes, one governed by visionaries and technology enthusiasts (the early adopters and innovators), the other by pragmatists (the early majority). The early group makes their decisions based on their own analyses. They do not look to others for corroborative support. Pragmatists do. Indeed, word-of-mouth endorsements are by far the most impactful input not only about what to buy and when but also from whom.

Peanut, the maker of a social networking app for women, is entering into the investing space with today’s launch of a microfund called StartHER. As the name implies, the new fund will focus on investing in women, as well as other historically excluded founders “of all ages, life stages, ethnicities and sexual orientations,” the company says. In particular, StartHER aims to tackle the difficulties specific groups have in raising their first capital — something typically referred to as the “friends and family round.”

Peanut argues there’s inherent bias in assuming that every startup founder has access to what are, essentially, wealthy friends or family who can spare a little startup capital. These rounds often range in size from $10,000 to as large as $150,000 or more, and can make a difference when it comes to getting a new company off the ground.

“The assumption that founders should have networks able to invest in their businesses creates an unfair starting line for most groups. If we don’t remove barriers to that initial funding by providing access to capital, how can we ever hope to see a changing founder profile further through the fundraising funnel?” says Peanut CEO Michelle Kennedy, in a statement about the fund’s launch. “Peanut’s StartHER fund opens the door to founders looking for that early funding. It’s our opportunity to finally level the playing field. We want to be the family these founders can turn to, opening the door to our professional networks too.”

The lack of access to funds for female founders may have gotten worse during the pandemic. Crunchbase data indicates female-founded startups globally saw a 27% decrease in funding in 2020 as compared to 2019. The pandemic shut down access to in-person networking opportunities and disproportionately impacted the family caretakers who tend to be women, as schools, daycares and other childcare assistance businesses closed their doors. These changes may have contributed to the decline, though it’s hard to pinpoint.

But even outside the pandemic’s impacts, women are underrepresented in venture investing — including on the firm’s side. Only 13% of decision-makers at VC firms are women, which can influence what startups receive funding.

“It’s no secret that the venture capital industry is dominated by those with privilege and lucrative connections. As a member of the Female Founders Fund, I’m excited to be a part of StartHER’s investment committee to help these entrepreneurs, who have not been adequately recognized, grow their networks in the venture capital community,” said Anu Duggal, Founding Partner of Female Founders Fund, who joined SheHER’s investment committee.

StartHER says it’s looking to step in to fill that gap by offering small investments to early-stage, pre-seed businesses focused on making a positive impact on society, healthcare, or the environment. According to its online application, StartHER will write checks of between $25,000 and $50,000 — likely one of the first checks a new startup may receive. The overall fund is $300,000 in size, and will make 3-4 investments in 2021. Peanut will not take an equity stake in the companies it invests in.

“Moving forward, we’ll be considering other factors such as deal flow to help inform how we invest and the companies we choose to invest in,” explains Kennedy. We’re heavily focused on making the right investments that will have the most impact versus simply making returns. For StartHER, our goal is not to make X number of investments for X returns, but to diversify the VC funnel by serving as an entry point to capital for underrepresented founders,” she says.

Along with Duggal and Kennedy, the investment committee for the fund includes journalist and angel investor Bérénice Magistretti; Chief Business Officer at Conde Nast Britain, Vanessa Kingori MBE; Founder of Shiffon Co. and Startup Girl Foundation, Shilpa Yarlagadda; and author, columnist and Brand Strategist, Elizabeth Uviebinene.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, and the committee meets every six months to consider the fund’s applications. Beyond the investment, startups who receive SheHER funds will also be given access and office hours to the networks of the committee members, the website says.

 

We’ve spent millions of dollars running ads for brands like Outschool, Imperfect Produce and Microsoft. At Demand Curve, we’ve worked with over 500 startups, meticulously documenting growth tactics for all growth channels. This post also incorporates what we’ve learned from our agency, Bell Curve.

Here are seven ad types that have proven to increase click-through rates (CTR), with examples of each. Clone them to test in your own social ad campaigns.

Customer reactions

If you’re selling a consumer product, it’s likely that some of your customers have posted product reviews, unboxings or recommendation videos on their social media accounts. You can use your customers’ user-generated videos in your social ads — with permission.

Search through Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for posts that mention your product. Reach out to the customer and ask them if you can use their content in an ad campaign, and subsequently, compile the most positive reactions into a video ad.

This works well because dramatic faces are attention magnets. Make sure the thumbnail photo shows a strong emotional image. People will click because they can’t help but want to see what provoked the emotion. User-generated reaction videos also highlight your products’ “Moment of Wow.” If users care enough about your product to make a positive reaction video, their energy is contagious. Your ad audience will connect your product with a strong positive emotion.

You versus the competition

Comparison ads anchor your product against something your audience already knows. This works well for both ads and the landing page your ad will lead to when clicked on. Try positioning your strongest value proposition — the most valuable promise you’re making to your customer — against your generic competitors.

In the white-hot creator economy space, startups are increasingly looking to build paint-by-numbers platforms to help budding creators more easily execute on what were once seemingly insurmountable business challenges.

The ex-Uber team at Pietra is cashing in on this vision with a plan to build a backend for launching and scaling creator product lines.

The startup, which previously acted as a marketplace for jewelry sellers, has changed a bit since they announced a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz in early 2019. Now, the company has pivoted from hocking diamonds to building a broad platform for creators that are looking to scale sales of physical goods, from interfacing with suppliers, handling orders and fulfillment and setting up online storefronts.

Pietra tells TechCrunch they’ve just raised a $15 million Series A led by Founders Fund with additional participation from Andreessen Horowitz, TQ Ventures and Abstract Ventures. The deal was led by Founders Fund’s Keith Rabois.

“We were initially focused on jewelry and luxury and the rise of creators in this luxury segment,” CEO Ronak Trivedi tells TechCrunch. “When we launched our beta last fall we had this platform that had evolved from a marketplace to a creator hub where any size creator could come in, use the platform, marketplace and tools to effectively launch a digital-first consumer business in the most efficient, cost-effective way possible.”

Pietra allows customers to shop around with a network of suppliers, find which one is best for them and move through the process from crafting samples through order fulfillment with a tech platform to guide them through the process. Trivedi says the ultimate goal is to “find the best suppliers in the world and try and bring them on the platform at the lowest minimum orders, so that it allows the most people to try to start a business.”

The startup is trying to help small creators scale their product distribution, but also handle all of the bits that can determine success when it comes to launching a brand in the first place, including building a pre-sale website and building up some attractive marketing images of products.

Early on, Pietra has a pretty distinct list of product verticals that they’re specializing in, including swimwear, makeup, apparel, fragrances and jewelry, among a few others. Overall, their platform seems pretty centered on the types of products that have been broadly successful with influencers who are looking to build out their first brands.

Pietra’s pricing depends on how many of their services you’re using and what the scale of your operation is, but most services are charged on a per-unit basis, with the startup also taking a percentage fee on goods sold through their marketplace. The startup is also working on a Pro offering with differentiated pricing designed for slightly more established brands that are doing multiple production runs per year.

 

Australian rocket launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies is betting that bigger isn’t always better. The company has developed a small launch vehicle it calls Eris, a 25-meter (82 foot) rocket that can deliver a payload of up to 215 kilograms (474 pounds) to sun synchronous orbit. Now, it’s raised a $61 million AUD ($46 million USD) Series C round to take Eris to space next year.

Eris is much smaller than other launch companies’ rockets. Relativity Space’s Terran One has a max payload capacity to LEO of around 1,250 kg (2,756 lbs); even SpaceX’s Falcon 1, its first and smallest orbital rocket, could deliver 450 kg (990 pounds). Gilmour Space is wagering that the lighter payload will result in lower costs for a burgeoning suite of customers looking to send spacecraft to orbit.

The funds will also go toward nearly doubling the company’s workforce, from 70 to 120 employees, and developing a new commercial spaceport at Abbot Point, Queensland. Australian legislators approved construction of the launch site in May. Gilmour Space is also examining a proposed launch site in South Australia to facilitate polar orbit launches.

Gilmour Space has already signed agreements with prospective customers for future Eris launches. This includes contracts with two Australian space startups: Space Machines Company, to launch a 35 kg spacecraft on Eris’s inaugural flight, and Fleet Space Technologies, to carry six nanosatellites in 2023. Gilmour Space has also signed an agreement with U.S.-based Momentus to use its orbital transfer services.

The round was led by Fine Structure Ventures and included contributions from Australian VCs Blackbird and Main Sequence, and Australian pension funds HESTA, Hostplus and NGS Super. Blackbird and Main Sequence are returning investors after leading Gilmour’s Series A and Series B, respectively. This is the largest amount of private equity funding ever raised by a space company in Australia, and brings the company’s total amount raised to $87 million AUD ($66 million USD).

Over the past year, there has been a surge of newly formed digital banks aimed at specific demographics. The banks in nearly all cases are trying to meet the needs of certain populations that they believe are feeling left out or underserved by traditional financial institutions.

The latest such neobank to emerge is New York-based Daylight, which describes itself as the first LGBTQ+ digital banking platform in the United States. (There is a digital bank in Brazil with a similar mission called Pride Bank).

Founded by LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs Rob Curtis (CEO), Billie Simmons, a trans woman (COO) and Paul Barnes Hoggett (CTO), Daylight is announcing today that it has secured $5 million in a seed funding round. Kapor Capital and Precursor Capital co-led the round, which included participation from Anthemis Group, Clocktower, Financial Venture Studio and Citi.

Daylight says its mission is to “build a more equitable financial life for LGBTQ+ folks and their chosen families.” The company’s services are targeted toward LGBTQ+ people, their families, and allies — or as Daylight describes it, “values-based consumers who want to support the queer community.”

The startup, which was founded in 2020, plans to use its new capital mostly to expand its flagship product and lifestyle services, which are designed to improve financial equality and inclusion for the estimated 30-million-plus Americans who identify as LGBTQ+. It also plans to build out a LGBTQ+ business marketplace and a platform that offers discounts and rewards when members shop at merchants whose actions support the queer community.

In an interview with TechCrunch Curtis explained why he believes Daylight is uniquely positioned to help the population deal with challenges such as higher debt accumulation to factors such as pre-existing conditions, lower insurance levels, HIV management needs and [gender] transition costs. At the same time, many members of the community also have lower income levels due to “continued workplace discrimination.”

“LGBT people engage with money really differently and there’s a multitude of reasons for that,” Curtis said. “We spend about the same proportion of our income on discretionary spend, but we’re about 20% less likely to have a savings account, 20% less likely to own investments like stocks, or a quarter less likely to own a mutual fund. And we estimate that only about 30% of our community has any estate planning in place.”

Also, life in general tends to be more costly for LGBTQ+ persons, Curtis believes.

“It is expensive to be a queer person,” he said. “Not only do we find that when we come out to our parents, 40% of us no longer have financial support for things like college and those transitions from childhood into adulthood. We end up with 50% more college debt. We also have increased sexual health costs and some have gender affirming surgery that they need to pay for.”

“By the time we get to our 30s, we will be told ‘you can have one of the following three things: gender affirming surgery, a home deposit or a child,’ ” Curtis added. And, on top of that, having a child is generally more expensive for this population because people either have to adopt or hire a surrogate.

Kapor Capital Partner Brian Dixon believes that the fact that Daylight’s founders have personally experienced problems within the traditional banking industry gives them the necessary insight to help others in the LGBTQ+ community.

One of those problems include friction associated with names on issued cards, which leads to customers being outed as trans. The population also faces a lack of adequate financing products, Dixon believes, for things such as surrogacy, IVF, adoption, transition support and mental health.

“Many neobanks do not provide a truly unique banking experience that will result in a mass exodus from traditional banks,” Dixon said. “Daylight has an opportunity to be the outlier, especially given their focus on community. Daylight’s unique features include a seamless card issuance process that allows trans and non-binary customers to order a card in their preferred name, book sessions with expert LGBTQ+ financial coaches, get peer-to-peer advice from their digital community and earn rewards that are meaningful to the LGBT+ community.”

Daylight will offer features such as a checking account, the ability for members to get paid two days early, free ATMs and “no hidden fees,” according to Curtis.

“I think that payday early is really important because we know that there are high rates of credit card declines for folks who are buying hormones,” he said.

Another feature the Daylight platform offers is personalized recommendations to members which alert them when they’re spending money with merchants that support anti-LGBTQ+ politicians and initiatives, a practice known as “rainbow washing.” It will also offer alternative merchants that it says are “more aligned with the community’s values.”

“LGBTQ+ consumers, and those that support them, are very intentional about where they spend, but it’s difficult for an individual to know whether they’re spending in line with their values, or inadvertently shopping with brands that engages in rainbow washing while funding politicians and projects that work against our interests,” Curtis said.

Daylight is currently in beta but already has “thousands and thousands” of customers on its wait list, said Curtis, who estimates that it will have 10,000 customers by the time it launches in October.

Other digital banks targeting specific demographics that have raised funding over the past year include Fair, a multilingual digital bank and financial services platform that recently launched to the public after raising $20 million in 40 days earlier this year. Others that have emerged include Greenwood, First Boulevard and Cheese.

 

Mandolin just marked its first birthday earlier this month, and yet the Indianapolis-based startup is already announcing a $12 million Series A. That’s a quick follow up to the $5 million seed it raised in early October of last year. Turns out the global pandemic is a pretty fortuitious time to launch and grow a concert streaming platform.

The oversubscribed round was co-led by 645 Ventures and Foundry Group and featured additional funding from existing investors like High Alpha and TIME Ventures (Marc Benioff).

The big question, of course, is what happens to a company like Mandolin when the world starts opening back up? Sure concert livestreams got a massive boost as fans and artists alike were seeking an outlet as touring ground to a halt. But what now that venues are starting to reopen.

“As artists return to performing in sold out venues, Live+ will undoubtedly become a can’t-live-without digital complement that amplifies live shows,” CEO Mary Kay Huse said in a release. “Our new round of financing will support us in driving innovation of our core solution, delivering new digital offerings, and reinforcing our routes to market, so that every show is Live+.”

Granted, that’s…pretty abstract. But the simple answer is the company has been looking toward enhancing the in-person event as well, ahead of an inevitable reopening. Essentially the company wants to build a companion app for shows.

Here’s what Huse told Variety last week, “I would love it if we could see upwards of 50% of in-person attendees experiencing something digitally while in the venue, as early as before the end of the year. It’s just creating a compelling content that makes them want to do it.”

The company will also continue to focus on streaming, which may see a hit, but certainly isn’t going away, post-pandemic. The news also sees 645 Managing Partner Nnamdi Okike joining the company’s board.

“During COVID-19, livestreaming has been a game-changer for fans who want to experience their favorite artists, and for artists and venues who want to bring exciting live events for their fans,” Okike said. “Mandolin provides the best technology platform to enable these experiences, and they’re also scaling a company to meet the needs of this fast-growing category.”

 

The American IPO market is hot for many companies, but surprisingly cool for others. The gap between the two cohorts of private companies looking to list is becoming notable.

When Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi first set an IPO price range, The Exchange was curious about why the company felt so inexpensive. Compared to its American comps, shares in Didi simply felt underpriced at its proposed valuation interval. Recently, Didi stuck to its initial expectations by pricing at $14 per share, the upper end of its range, but no higher.

This week also brought a lackluster float for Chinese grocery-delivery company DingDong, which cut its IPO raise but only managed a flat American debut. Another China-based online grocery delivery service that went public domestically last week, Missfresh, is doing even worse.

With just those few data points, you’d be hard-pressed to be particularly bullish about U.S.-listed IPOs. Why go public in the United States if you are going to be underpriced and then trade poorly? The answer is that while many Chinese companies are seemingly struggling to find the demand that they expect for their shares on American exchanges, domestic companies are seeing some opposite results.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

We’re talking tech companies here, I should add; The Exchange doesn’t track IPO results for commodities diggers and biotech labs. It’s a big world. We have to focus.

There are contrary data points to our general thesis. Nio’s recent share price appreciation could be construed as such. But if we parse recent IPO news from SentinelOne and Xometry in contrast to what we’ve seen from Chinese tech companies’ own paths to the American public markets, there really does seem to be a gap forming.

Uneven ground

Didi’s IPO price of $14 per share values the company at around $67 billion on a nondiluted basis, and as high as $70 billion if we counted more shares in its market cap calculations. As we previously calculated, with around $6.5 billion in total Q1 2021 revenue and positive net income, the company is trading at a stiff multiples discount to Uber.

Indeed, Uber’s trailing price/sales ratio is north of 8x. If we valued Didi’s revenues from the last twelve months at the same price, it would be worth nearly $179 billion. It’s not. And that’s the gap that we want to stress.

That a few other Chinese tech IPOs listed in the United States underperformed in the last week is contrasted by a blizzard of positive IPO results from domestic companies from just this week:

It used to be a heavily traveled two-way street in corporate America: CEOs joined other companies’ boards to broaden their experiences, expand their influence, or simply because it felt good. Boards sought out CEOs because of the knowledge they bring and their unique ability to interact with the company CEO as an equal.

But the number of sitting CEOs on outside boards keeps shrinking. As the CEO role has become more difficult and demanding, greater numbers of chief executives are shying away from external board roles and many boards now limit their own CEOs’ board assignments as well.

The pandemic accelerated the trend, according to a report by management consulting firm Korn Ferry, citing “evidence that the unprecedented demands posed by the pandemic led many CEO directors to resign from outside boards to focus on their own organizations.” Fewer than half of CEOs now serve on an outside board, the report said.

At the same time, many corporations are feeling pressure to bring more gender and racial diversity to their boards and are making membership available to a broader array of candidates than in the past.

Is the decrease in CEO board participation a positive or negative? Interestingly, it’s both.

Here are four benefits of CEOs serving on boards:

Advising another company can make for a better CEO. CEOs who opt out of corporate board directorships out of fear of overextending themselves — and boards who restrict their own CEOs’ board assignments for the same reason — miss a key point: Time on a board usually makes them a better leader.

I’m on two outside boards. An inside view of another company’s challenges and opportunities, its peaks and valleys, what strategies worked and didn’t, has revealed insights I’ve ended up applying at my own company. Being on the other side of the table has even helped me better understand how to communicate with my company’s board.

Serving on a board can prevent myopia. Because of digital disruption, businesses must move at an unprecedented pace to stay competitive. Job No. 1 for all CEOs is to act on this reality every day inside their companies. But drawing exclusively from their own company’s experience can blind a leader to broader perspectives in the outside world. A board stint is a great way to ensure they’re getting those.

Board memberships can make CEOs more empathetic. There’s a lot of talk these days about the need for heightened empathy in the C-suite, and with good reason: The global health crisis, racial injustice and other extraordinary stressors demand that senior executives possess what McKinsey described as four qualities “to manage in crisis and shepherd their organization into a post-crisis next normal” — awareness, vulnerability, empathy and compassion.

In these times, it’s critically important for a CEO to cultivate as wide a frame of reference as possible, and involvement with another company through a board directorship accomplishes that.

Helping another company does broader good. If a CEO has the wherewithal beyond their own company responsibilities to bring value to another firm’s board, that’s a positive for the world at large. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all.

For example, I’m a board member at a company that once was strictly a manufacturer of home standby generators. It’s now digital savvy, with Wi-Fi-equipped generators providing a number of services on users’ smartphones. This means they also needs a strong cybersecurity strategy, my area of expertise. I take satisfaction in believing my guidance is benefiting the company, its shareholders and its customers.

So what’s good about the drop in CEO board assignments? That’s easy: more opportunity for non-CEOs and other traditionally underrepresented groups, including women and people of color, to join corporate boards.

“In a little-noticed but remarkable shift, many firms are skipping the corner suite and looking elsewhere for directors,” Korn Ferry reported. “Recent data shows that nearly two-thirds of the more than 400 director seats filled last year were taken by someone other than a CEO. Experts say since both the pandemic and the racial-equality protests of last year, companies are determined to create boards with more diverse faces and more specific skill sets.”

Equilar’s most recent Gender Diversity Index found that at the end of Q1 2021, 24.3% of all board seats in the Russell 3000 were occupied by women, up from 15% at the end of 2016. “The path toward equal representation of men and women in public company boardrooms seemed to go nowhere for decades, but there has been a significant clearing in recent years,” the report said. (Nevertheless, Equilar cautions that boards won’t hit gender parity until 2032.)

And many of these non-CEO board members are doing an excellent job. According to a survey by Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, 79% of board members feel that, in practice, active CEOs are no better than non-CEO board members. A CEO may bring cachet to the board, but many non-CEOs contribute real work as a director, the study said.

Increased diversity on boards isn’t just an excellent development by itself; board experience positions members well for future leadership roles and thus can act as a proxy to get more women and people of color into corner offices.

Making board membership accessible to a wider range of candidates beyond typically white male CEOs — they still account for almost 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs — offers hope that diversity in the business leader ranks will keep rising.

All things considered, I think this potential outweighs the negatives of more CEOs staying out of outside companies’ board rooms.

Drone delivery startup Zipline, a company that got its start delivering medical supplies across Africa, has raised $250 million in new funding. This latest round has vaulted the company’s valuation to $2.75 billion and will fuel further expansion of its logistics networks in Africa and the United States.

Zipline made a name for itself first in Rwanda and then in Ghana, where it delivered blood, vaccines, life-saving medications and other essential supplies using autonomous electric drones. The company, which launched in 2014, is vertically integrated – meaning it designs and manufactures the unmanned drones, the logistics software, and the accompanying launch and landing system. Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told TechCrunch that this was more by necessity than design, noting that when the company first started developing its drone tech, it quickly realized that off-the-shelf components weren’t reliable or didn’t integrate well.

“Over time Zipline has had to basically rip every single thing out of the system, whether it was the flight computer [. . .] or the battery pack, or the aircraft itself. And we’ve had to build every single one of those things completely from scratch.”

Rinaudo stressed that Zipline doesn’t think of itself as a drone company, but rather an instant logistics provider. And while the company iteratively improves its autonomous drone model, much of its successes over the past five years have been related to building out its logistics network. After what Rinaudo described as a challenging first year of operations in Rwanda in 2016, the company has since partnered with logistics company UPS in that East African country, the Toyota Group in Japan, and it’s started working with Nigeria’s Kaduna and Cross River States. Here in the United States, the company has partnered with Novant Health to deliver medical equipment and personal protective gear in North Carolina and, notably, with retail giant Walmart delivering health and wellness products.

Unlike many companies that suffered during the pandemic, for Zipline there was an obvious opportunity to further accelerate its operations – not only delivering personal protective equipment but also COVID-19 vaccines. The company said it is planning to deliver 2.4 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year.

Zipline sees an additional opportunity in delivering healthcare items, such as pharmaceutical prescriptions, directly to people’s homes. “[Hospitals] really see instant logistics as the other half of telepresence,” Rinaudo said. “If you can have someone quickly pull out their phone and talk to a doctor, then the other half of the equation is, can we get you what you need?”

The company’s currently working with the Federal Aviation Administration to move from operating under an emergency waiver – granted by regulators during the pandemic – to a full commercial operating certification. One advantage Zipline may have over competitors in the FAA’s certification process is that it has many thousands of hours of safe flight data to show that it’s system is sound. It would be one of the first drone delivery companies to receive such a certification.

In the long run, Zipline may start to focus on other industries, but for now it’s laser focused on healthcare, Rinaudo said. He noted that in the last few months alone the company has signed service contracts for five new distribution centers in Nigeria and four in Ghana, as well as “multiple new service contracts” with hospital systems in the United States. This latest funding round, led by Baillie Gifford and with support from returning investors Temasek and Katalyst Ventures, and new investors Fidelity, Intercorp, Emerging Capital Partners and Reinvest Capital, will be used to build out the infrastructure for these new contracts.

Rinaudo said the aim is for Zipline to serve the majority of single-family detached homes across the United States over the coming three years or so.

“The fact that so many big companies like Toyota and Walmart are starting to make big bets in this instant logistics space, I think is a pretty clear sign that people realize this is coming,” Rinaudo said. “There’s a tidal wave of transformation coming. The exciting thing about it is that it’s going to totally transform the way that healthcare systems work, it’s going to totally transform the way that economic systems work, and it’s going to make it possible for logistics to serve people equally.”

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