Former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja to join Zipline on Sept 30

Zipline announced that former Tesla chief financial officer Deepak Ahuja will join Zipline as its first-ever chief business and financial officer on September 30.

Ahuja brings more than 20 years of financial leadership experience to Zipline's management team.

"In his new role, he will oversee all aspects of Zipline's global financial operations, including finance, accounting, investor relations, as well as global sales, excluding the Africa region," reads the release.

Most recently, Ahuja was the CFO at Verily Life Sciences. Prior to that, he was the CFO of Tesla where, among many things, he oversaw the company's rise to profitability.

"Rarely do I see this level of disruption and impact paired with the world-class technology that Zipline's team is building," Ahuja said. "The company's instant logistics solution was born out of a deep understanding of what their customers need, and has already delivered incredible value to people around the world by saving lives, time, money and reducing the environmental impact of deliveries on the planet. It's an exciting time for Zipline, and I'm thrilled to join the team as we keep building to offer these solutions at a massive scale."

Zipline was operating in three countries at the start of 2021. The company has since expanded to four new countries, began delivering new categories of products in the human and animal health, e-commerce and food sectors, and doubled the size of the population that it can serve. In addition to entering new markets, Zipline has grown its business in the countries where it already operated to include new delivery categories and new locations. Globally, Zipline operates in three continents and completes a delivery every two minutes. It also recently received FAA Part 135 approval for its long-range drone delivery service in the U.S.

"Deepak brings decades of experience helping to build revolutionary and disruptive companies in the transportation and health sectors," said Keller Rinaudo, CEO and co-founder of Zipline. "He embodies our values as a leader and shares our vision and passion for building the world's first instant delivery system that serves all people equally. We are scaling quickly and did as many deliveries last month as we did in the entirety of 2019. Deepak's track record will have a massive impact as we continue to expand our footprint, support new categories, and build a business for the long-term."

In addition to Ahuja, Zipline recently added its first-ever chief marketing officer, Ashley Chandler, to its growing executive team. Chandler joined Zipline at the end of July and was previously the CMO of Color Health during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Before that, she led marketing at Stripe and spent more than 10 years at Google where she oversaw brand marketing for Google Cloud.

Zipline
Zipline designs, manufactures and operates the world's largest instant logistics and delivery system for businesses, governments and consumers. Zipline is transforming the way goods move, from powering Rwanda's national blood delivery network and Ghana's Covid-19 vaccine distribution to providing on-demand home delivery for e-commerce, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes.

"The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Through its technology, the company is decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access for billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain," reads the release.

To date, Zipline has delivered more than 380,000 packages with more than 3.5 million products, and flown more than 25 million autonomous miles. Each flight produces about 30 times less CO2 emissions per mile than an average electric vehicle and up to 98% less CO2 emissions than a combustion engine vehicle, according to company estimates. The company's instant logistics system currently supports the medical, health and retail sectors, delivering blood, vaccines, Covid supplies, prescriptions, e-commerce items, products that support human and animal health, and food.