Justin Kan

Today, Zipline raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation. When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldn’t try. We started the company on a cow farm. We worked out of run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didn’t have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team. We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive. Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. We’re now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands. Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud “swarm of bees” delivering to their backyard or their neighbor’s. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery! Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. We’re starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, we’ve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer. Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didn’t think the company was “investable”. Most people didn’t even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined. There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where we’re going. 🚀🌎

Introducing Flint, @Recursive_SI’s first model: a fast local coding model built with our automated research system, the Eureka Machine. • Best-in-class fast local coding • Up to 2x faster than comparable models: 125+ tokens/sec on a MacBook Pro, 150+ on RTX Spark • Built from scratch in under 4 months Private, unmetered intelligence on your own machine. Open weights available now on @huggingface, run it locally on your favorite framework or try it for free on @opencode or @pidotdev.

Whop has raised $200M in Series D funding at a $5.1B valuation, backed by @sequoia and @shopify. It really feels like we are barely touching the tip of the iceberg in a market larger than anyone can imagine. We first launched Whop as a better way for us to sell sneaker bots, one of the most niche types of desktop software out there. Total TAM? Probably $20,000 per day. Who cares, tiny market. But, what people discounted is the idea that there were actually 70,000 other markets exactly like that one. Beyond the investment itself, I am especially excited to welcome legendary silicon valley investor @dougleone to our board of directors. Doug and the sequoia team are nothing but a brilliant, resourceful, and principled group of people. My co-founder Cameron and I started building on Shopify when we were 13 years old. Shopify is one of the most impactful all-in-one cloud ecosystems ever created; @tobi has pioneered modern entrepreneurship the way we know it and we are thrilled to have him in our corner. We have a tenet at Whop to be the dumbest in the room and I am very grateful that this has recently become a lot easier. We are focused on markets, scale economies, and progressive media. If that is up your alley, please message me directly. The $200M raised will support our expansion as we build economic infrastructure for the next century, continuing on our mission of delivering everyone an income.

Wabi 2.0 is live! personal agents are one person, one chat. but the parts of life that matter run on more than one person Wabi is an agent you use together. you talk to it, it does stuff, builds the apps you need, and anyone can join the thread - your partner, your best friend, the preschool moms groupchat school changes pickup time → Wabi updates the family calendar, everyone sees it. a show you’d both love → Wabi finds a night that works, gets the tickets. the trip everyone keeps talking about → Wabi picks the dates, builds the itinerary, books it go start a thread with your people 👇

What if your dinner could fly over traffic instead of sitting in it? We are now scaling to provide Uber Eats more than 1 million autonomous deliveries a day. Uber is becoming an investor in Zipline. We’ve entered the scaling era for robotics and physical AI.

Are we the woolly mammoths? Progress ep06 is live with @justinkan, co-founder of Twitch. Mammoths built the grassland they lived on, then changed it too fast to survive. Justin thinks we might be next. We talk AI job loss, his bet on a Mamdani-style president in 2028, and what selling Twitch for $970M didn't fix.