Alphabet-backed Bay Area startup about to begin dropping blood by parachute over Rwanda

In the technology business, entrepreneurs identify market opportunities in terms of “pain points” — problems to solve with a new product or service. And “pain” usually just means inconvenience — like having to shop for groceries or find a taxi.

For scientist and former professional rock climber Keller Rinaudo, the pain point he identified was a literal one.

On a trip to Tanzania, Rinaudo had met a public health worker who showed him an electronic list of names, medical conditions and locations — thousands of them — because he’d built an early warning system that allowed desperately sick or injured Tanzanians in remote areas to send messages for help via cellphones distributed around the country.

But, Rinaudo says, no resources existed to actually respond to the multitude of pleas — help was not on the way. “I realized I was looking at a database of death,” Rinaudo says.

Rinaudo, a roboticist with a Harvard undergraduate degree in economics and biotechnology, decided to create a system that could deliver lifesaving medical products to remote areas of the developing world, where hundreds of thousands of people die every year because they can’t get blood or drugs in time. The problem is particularly severe in rural areas with no road access or limited dirt tracks that become impassable for months during the rains.

Rinaudo, 29, aimed for an “elegant” solution. He is CEO of Zipline, a for-profit Bay Area tech company backed by Google Ventures. Next month, Zipline is set to start using fixed-wing drones to drop blood for transfusions in Rwanda. Half the blood will be used for mothers hemorrhaging after giving birth, while another third will go to children suffering from malaria-related anemia. Zipline’s drones will make 50 deliveries a day, every day, year-round, Rinaudo says.

On Tuesday, the White House announced that Zipline, pending regulatory approval, will make demonstration deliveries of blood and other medical products to remote communities, including Indian reservations, in Nevada, Washington and Maryland. Zipline has secured $18 million in funding, including a recent $800,000 infusion from UPS, to put its robot planes in the air. The drones can fly in virtually any weather to drop blood — and soon vaccines and other medical products — in small cardboard boxes that float down under plastic parachutes.

In Rwanda, workers at 22 hospitals and clinics will be able to send a text and within an hour receive what they need by parachute. The speed of the delivery keeps blood fresh. For Zipline, the deal with the Rwandan government is only the beginning, Rinaudo says — and one day you may see a “Zip” drone flying overhead right here in America.

Q You had a lot of choices regarding what direction to take in your life — why did you choose this?

A I think that there are not that many opportunities in life to build something that can have a hugely positive impact on the world but can also be a really enduring business. As we started to really understand the need here and how important a solution was and how much better a solution would be than existing ways of solving these problems, we just couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Q Why did you go for-profit instead of nonprofit?

A The company’s been a for-profit since we started it five years ago. We’re a technology startup and we’re a logistics company. There are not that many logistics nonprofits out there. We’re going to be able hire a stronger team, involve more impactful investors and have a much bigger impact on the world in the long run being for-profit.

Q What was the toughest question you had to address from a potential investor?

A People think that the only way you can make money is working in the U.S. And I think people have a sense that markets outside the U.S. — and especially markets in global public health or in Africa — are really tiny. That was the biggest challenge for us, making it clear why we’re starting in countries other than the U.S. and how that could become a big business over time.

Q How did you and your team react when you made your first successful test parachute delivery?

A We had lots of failures before we figured out how to do that. We actually tested about 40 different air brakes. Once we decided that we liked that parachute air brake solution, we tested about 40 different versions of that.

Q What’s the biggest obstacle to getting Zipline rolled out in more countries?

A There’s just going be a lot of learning that we have to do as we launch these first systems. I’m sure there are going to be setbacks. Doing something for the first time ever is always really hard. As we work through those setbacks, it’ll get easier and easier. It’ll get possible to launch in many more countries. We’ve heard from nearly every country in the developing world that they want this. We’re really more supply-constrained than demand-constrained.

Q Is Zipline in its current iteration intended to open up opportunities for delivery of commercial products?

A We ultimately might solve that problem. But for the time being, the need for health care logistics is so vast that we’re going to be focused on that exclusively for the indefinite future.

Q You’re very secretive about your testing location — what’s the reason for that?

A We’re not that secretive. We just prefer not to have people coming and snooping around. We operate from a really big test site. It’s been a huge advantage for the company to have a lot of land because we do all of our engineering development in the same place as we manufacture vehicles in the same place that we fly.

That allows for a really fast rate of innovation. We can build airplanes 100 times as fast as Boeing. We can’t operate at the cycle of typical aircraft (development) where it takes 10 years. People are dying today.

Contact Ethan Baron at 408-920-5011 or follow him at Twitter.com/ethanbaron.