Zipline Bets Nigeria Becomes Its Biggest African Market With 12 New Drone Hubs By 2028

Zipline plans to build 12 additional drone distribution centers across Nigeria by 2028, growing its network from three operational hubs to 15 and turning what began as a state-level vaccine pilot into a national logistics buildout. The California-based autonomous delivery company says the expanded network would connect up to 20,000 health facilities and put healthcare commodities within reach of nearly 100 million Nigerians, roughly half the country’s population.

Anthonio Pinheiro, Zipline’s newly appointed Nigeria Country Director, disclosed the plan in a virtual interview with TechCabal. The three states Zipline currently operates in, Kaduna, Cross River, and Bayelsa, serve more than 1,300 health facilities and about six million people. That is the gap the company wants to close: from six million people to 100 million in under three years.

I have covered Zipline’s Nigeria operations long enough to know the harder part of this story is the one the announcement skips. Last August, DroneXL reported that Zipline’s Kaduna deliveries were suspended after a change in state administration. The expansion target is real. So is the political fragility underneath it.

The expansion reframes Zipline as infrastructure, not a health pilot

Pinheiro told TechCabal the company is pursuing a federal-scale framework rather than negotiating state-by-state, the model Zipline has used across Africa since 2016. States would integrate into a national autonomous delivery network instead of striking isolated deals. A partnership involving Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health and a U.S. government grant initiative covering five African countries supports the shift.

Pinheiro framed the company in terms that go past drones. “Zipline is an AI robotics infrastructure company,” he said. “A lot of people think about drones, but our drones are autonomous. Our entire infrastructure is built on artificial intelligence and robotics.” Healthcare stays the focus for now, though he pointed to agriculture, animal health, and e-commerce as later verticals once the core network matures.

Worth keeping the chronology straight here. Zipline did not start as a logistics-infrastructure company. It grew out of Romotive, a smartphone-controlled robot maker founded in 2011 that shut down in 2014. The blood-and-vaccine delivery business that became Zipline launched in Rwanda in 2016. The “AI infrastructure” framing is recent, and it describes where the company is heading, not the bet it started with.

Nigeria’s broken medical supply chain is the actual product

The problem Zipline sells against is decades of unreliable last-mile delivery in rural Nigeria, where clinics run short of vaccines, blood, anti-venom, malaria drugs, and maternal care supplies. A 2026 study on family planning services found that 56.8% of rural health facilities ran out of contraceptives at least once within three months, against 43.2% of urban centers. Patients sometimes travel hours only to find the drug they need is gone.

Zipline’s pitch is centralized inventory plus on-demand flights. Hospitals stop carrying large reserves, and the company delivers when a shortfall hits. “If a hospital requests 20 vaccine doses and 25 patients show up, they can call us, and we can deliver the additional five within 30 to 45 minutes,” Pinheiro explained. He cited a snakebite case where anti-venom reached a remote hospital within 47 minutes of an urgent request.

The company’s claimed outcomes are substantial: a sharp drop in vaccine stockouts in supported areas, and maternal mortality in supported facilities falling by more than 50%, attributed partly to faster blood deliveries. Those are Zipline’s figures, drawn from its own operations and partnerships with groups including Gavi and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. They have not been independently audited in the reporting this story draws on.

Solar power lets the hubs run around Nigeria’s grid

Zipline’s distribution centers in Kaduna and Cross River run fully on solar with backup energy redundancy, which matters in a country where grid reliability is a daily operational risk. Pinheiro said the renewable setup has eliminated tens of thousands of liters of monthly diesel consumption at some sites, and that the hubs supply surrounding communities and clinics rather than drawing from them.

He also pushed back on the assumption that drone logistics is too expensive for African markets. “We end up being more affordable because of the operational efficiencies we create,” he said, pointing to reduced storage and transport costs for states and better visibility into how healthcare is actually used.

Regulation is the constraint Zipline cannot engineer away

Airspace approval remains the hardest barrier to scaling autonomous flight in Nigeria, where security concerns around unmanned aircraft run deep. As of May 2026, operators must secure an End-User Certificate from the Office of the National Security Adviser before they can even approach the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority for a permit. That is a two-gate process before a single drone flies.

Pinheiro described the regulatory posture as collaborative rather than obstructive. “I see those policies as issues of national security,” he said. “The government wants to protect Nigeria’s airspace, and rightly so.” He argued Nigeria is hitting a point where policy readiness, market demand, and technical maturity line up, and noted that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed how far behind rural healthcare access stayed even as Lagos and Abuja improved.

DroneXL’s Take

This expansion is the optimistic mirror image of a story DroneXL ran in August 2025, when Zipline’s Kaduna operations were paused after a new state administration came in and put its commitments under review. Same state. Same company. Between August 2022 and March 2023, that Kaduna hub had delivered more than 225,000 medical items, including 154,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses. Then a leadership change stalled it. Kaduna is one of the three states Pinheiro now counts in the 1,300-facility base, so either operations resumed or the baseline figure folds in a site that has been intermittent. The reporting this story draws on does not resolve which, and that gap is the whole ballgame for a 100-million-person target.

Here is the pattern I keep coming back to. Zipline’s African deployments live or die on who pays and who signs, not on whether the drones work. The drones work. We documented that in January when we looked at the economics of Zipline’s $7.6 billion valuation, where the contrast was stark: in Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, governments and NGOs fund delivery because the payoff is obvious, while the U.S. consumer business still leans on venture subsidy. A federal-scale framework in Nigeria is Zipline’s attempt to buffer itself against exactly the kind of state-level political reversal that froze Kaduna. Whether a national agreement actually insulates operations from sub-national budget cycles is the open question, and it is the right question to track.

The U.S. grant covering five African countries is the variable I would watch most closely. Foreign-aid commitments to African health logistics have proven sensitive to Washington’s budget priorities, and Zipline’s federal-scale Nigeria plan is partly underwritten by one. If that funding holds through the country’s next procurement cycle, the path to 15 hubs is plausible. If it does not, the company is back to negotiating state by state, which is the model it just told TechCabal it wants to leave behind. Pinheiro did not address what happens to the 2028 target if the U.S. grant component contracts, and he was not asked. The answer matters more than any delivery-time statistic in the announcement.

Sources: TechCabal, TechAfrica News.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.