By: Taylor Craig

After more than 13,000 deliveries in Rwanda, drone delivery startup Zipline is expanding to Ghana to provide medical supplies to remote areas.

Keenan Wyrobek, co-founder and CTO at Zipline, joined Cheddar from Zipline’s drone manufacturing center in Half Moon Bay, California about his company’s expansion to Ghana.

“It’s incredibly important. Two billion people on this planet lack reliable access to central medical supplies,” Wyrobek said. “It represents a massive shift in how [Ghana] runs their health care supply chain. They’re all ready for this, and it really enables all of their doctors to get what they need when they need it.”

Zipline first launched in Rwanda and used that experience to secure a $12 million contract with the Ghana government.

“The Rwandan team is run and staffed entirely by Rwandans. They run an aerospace grade operation that is world class, and that is literally teaching the world how to do this kind of service,” Wyrobek said.”They've hired and trained the team that’s scaling up in Ghana because they’ve been doing this at a scale that no one has achieved anywhere in the world in drone operations.”

Wyrobek says the Rwanda operation currently flies once around the equator of the Earth every week. He intends to bring that experience to North Carolina later this year.

“This is not some demonstration level operation. This is a massive scale drone delivery operation,” Wyrobek said. “Zipline is on a mission to solve the problem globally.”