Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?

I've been working at Zipline for over four years now. We're building a scalable and reliable UAV based delivery system with a focus on making medical supplies accessible to all humans that need them. We're operating distribution centers in Rwanda, Ghana, and North Carolina, and I believe we're still the only such system operating in production.

I'm an embedded software engineer, and I work on a lot on the firmware running in the vehicles, as well as in all the various ground equipment we've developed to make our system easier to operate. I also touch a lot of "high level" python to build out developer tools and when interfacing to the company's broader software stacks. It's important for our system to be as automated as possible so that we can hire and train local flight operators to serve their communities with minimal engineering support. I think that's something really cool about Zipline. Our flight operators are the most awesome, dedicated employees, and they're in the trenches launching hundreds of flights per day through extreme rain, heat and cold. I want to say that something like 1/3 of flights are for medical emergencies, too.

I've been very happy working here, also. It's a really good group of people. Everyone's dedicated and self motivated to move quickly, without compromising family or work life balance. We try to keep communication within the company as flat and direct as possible, too. There's no corporate politics or egos to maneuver around. Our CEO's car is one of the crappier cars in the parking lot. For surprise medical reasons I had to take quite a bit of time off at a really quite terrible time in the schedule earlier this year, and my coworkers happily picked up the slack and sent me an embarrassing amount of very luxurious chocolate.

Since I joined, my team has grown from just me to about a dozen people, and all the growth has done is made us busier with all the cool projects we're taking on. We're generally always hiring across the company, and especially on the embedded engineering team. Since I've been around a while, I tend to focus on broad architectural work while helping out on whatever project is the most on fire, and try to give newer team members a chance to focus on projects that they can own long term.

https://flyzipline.com/careers/

This is what I've been working on improving this past week. If you sign an NDA, I can tell what relevance it has to 1980s rap music... https://youtu.be/FeSCEalMOL8?t=85

> "Highly funded companies are expected to produce revenue growth."

Yup, this is exactly what I was hoping wasn't true: That it's impossible to be both well funded, high revenue growth AND do so while tackling a meaningful problem. ---

Don't want to make this thread about all the ways in which Tesla is a bad example (just first one that came to mind).