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Manna Air Delivery’s mission is to make lightning-fast suburban deliveries affordable, green and safe
Bobby Healy: ‘One of the very few trillion-dollar-plus opportunities anywhere in the world that an Irish company has a genuine shot at winning’ Manna Air Delivery’s mission is to make lightning-fast suburban deliveries affordable, green and safe Bobby Healy, founder and chief executive of Manna Air Delivery: the company plans to increase its delivery load from two million this year to 100 million in 2030.
Photograph: Naoise Culhane. He began his career building video games for Nintendo but for the last seven years, he’s been building Manna Air Delivery – a last-mile drone-delivery company that designs, manufactures and operates its own autonomous aircraft, end-to-end and entirely in-house. Manna’s self-described mission is to improve the world by making lightning-fast suburban deliveries affordable, green and safe. Manna runs live commercial services across four markets: the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Finland.
They employ close to 200 people in Ireland and are venture-backed, with $110 million raised through their recent Series B.Why am I being charged PRSI when I am on the State pension? For Manna, the insight was twofold: a road-based suburban delivery model that was visibly, fundamentally broken, set against the sheer scale of a robotic delivery market still in its infancy.
It is one of the very few trillion-dollar-plus opportunities anywhere in the world that an Irish company has a genuine shot at winning. Manna operates two complementary revenue streams. The first is a two-sided marketplace, where we charge both consumers and merchants per flight. The second is a B2B model, where we partner with aggregators like Uber, Just Eat and Deliveroo to replace their road-based deliveries with airborne ones.
Like any company building something genuinely new, we’ve worked through real challenges along the way, not least an evolving regulatory and planning landscape for a technology this novel. Worst advice: “It will never work. ”We are targeting 2 million deliveries annualised by the end of 2026, and 100 million deliveries by 2030. We’re transforming last-mile delivery, starting with food but extending well beyond it.
Our roadmap includes medical supplies, defibrillators and everyday parcels, all-use cases that are commercially valuable and genuinely beneficial to society. Few technologies can claim to be both a better business model and a better outcome for the communities they serve. Air delivery is one of them. AI is woven through everything we do, from writing code to project planning to day-to-day administration.
Every Manna employee has unlimited access to frontier AI models and is actively encouraged to use them to the fullest. We don’t treat AI as a novelty. We treat it as core infrastructure, a genuine force multiplier that lets a lean team move at the pace of a much larger one. US as a place in which to invest?
US trade policy, and tariffs in particular, has been a real challenge for our operations there. We’ve responded head-on by building our US manufacturing muscle, aligning fully with “build in America” requirements for drones. In parallel, we’ve partnered with a US operator to sub-licence an air-cargo permit, which lets us operate squarely within the long-standing cabotage rules that govern foreign-controlled carriersA Wicklow woman in Marbella: ‘I would make friends in the summer and they would then go home.
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