Autonomous drone delivery startup Manna plots major US expansion

Manna Aero, the Ireland-based autonomous drone delivery startup, has been a smaller player in the United States. Founder and CEO Bobby Healy told TechCrunch that’s about to change.

The startup, fueled by the $50 million in venture capital it raised in April, said Wednesday that it’s setting up a U.S. operations and manufacturing center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that will employ about 1,000 people over the next several years. Construction on the factory is underway and Healy expects manufacturing to begin there in about a year.

As construction continues, the company will focus on scaling its operations team to about 200 to 300 people over the next 12 months, according to Healy. The pace of hiring at the factory will depend on the rate of growth outside of Tulsa, he said, noting that the company is assessing six other U.S. cities. If all goes well, Manna will start entering those cities by the end of 2027.

The end goal is to turn Manna Aero into a major U.S. drone delivery operator that competes with Zipline, Amazon, and Google’s Wing, among others.

“It’s just the size of the market here, consumer behavior, and the fact that the aggregators (DoorDash, Uber Eats) have consolidated the market so well, and they’re so well run,” Healy said, explaining the U.S. expansion. “The United States has the market that everybody wants.”

Manna operates automated, remotely monitored drones that don’t land. Instead, they lower the package on a tether, the same technique used by Wing and Zipline. Manna has a hybrid business model. It is fundamentally a delivery-as-a-service company that charges per flight. But it has different ways of achieving that, including through partnerships with DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Uber Eats in Europe as well as direct partnerships with businesses and its own consumer-facing app.

Manna is still headquartered in Ireland, where its R&D, administrative, and manufacturing operations are based. But it no longer operates drone delivery in the country; Manna pulled back its drone delivery operations last month citing a lack of planning regulations that would allow it to scale there.

Instead, the startup is putting its capital and resources into the United States. The company hired former Ryanair CMO Kenny Jacobs as its executive chair and president to drive the expansion.

Healy said the Trump administration’s and the FAA’s policies have given the industry a “turbo boost” in the country.

“It’s trickling down into raw investment,” he said. “A company like us, we wouldn’t have had any plans to grow in the United States until the environment was ready from a regulatory standpoint to start growth, and so we’ve decided very clearly that now is the time for us to put every penny we have into the USA.”

Healy pointed to the growth at Amazon, Wing, and Zipline over the past year as evidence of those policies.

“We’re probably slightly behind the curve, but we’ll catch up quickly,” he said.

Manna isn’t entirely new to the United States. The startup began operating in 2023 in the AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone, which is part of a planned community near Dallas, Texas, developed by the real estate development company Hillwood. Healy said Manna has expanded into the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area and plans to continue to scale there over the next year.