Drone startup Zipline raised $25 million to deliver blood to transfusion patients.

The company plans to use the funding to extend its delivery beyond blood, eventually dropping medicine and vaccines. Within the next six months, Zipline hopes to begin making deliveries within the U.S., in collaboration with the White House and the FAA.

“The inability to deliver life-saving medicines to the people who need them the most causes millions of preventable deaths each year,” Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo said in the San Jose Mercury News. 

[Also: Post-EHR era: Buzzword or almost here? Best Hospital IT winners weigh in]

The startup partnered with the UPS Foundation and the vaccine alliance Gavi in May 2016 to explore using drones to transform the way life-saving medicines like blood and to begin transporting blood and vaccines to rural areas in Rwanda.

In October, Zipline started dropping blood in Rwanda, and plans to ramp up to between 50 and 150 on-demand deliveries a day to 21 local transfusion clinics.

In rural or remote areas, lack of transportation results in a  “last-mile problem” — lack of transportation and communication often makes it difficult to get blood or medicine from a city to the area in need. Zipline’s business model hopes to deliver blood quickly.

Drones are an ideal way to deliver the needed blood, Zipline said, because blood spoils quickly, many clinics cannot store enough blood to meet their needs, and long rainy seasons that wash out Rwanda’s roads make transportation by car or truck difficult.

Including its most recent round of funding, Zipline has raised $43 million. This new round was provided by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and other investors, and will also be used by the startup to expand its flights to other countries throughout Africa. 

Healthcare IT News' Best Hospital IT Departments 2016: 
⇒ Meet the winners
⇒ CIOs reveal what makes an IT shop great 
⇒Interactive map: Best Hospital IT Departments 
⇒ See the people who make their IT departments winners