Ireland’s Manna Aero isn’t playing small anymore. Not in the US. Founder Bobby Healy calls it a shift. A major one.
“The United States has the market everybody wants.”
They just closed $50 million. Venture cash. Fresh from April. Now they are building. A factory in Tulsa. Oklahoma. It will make jobs. About a thousand of them over the coming years. Concrete is being poured right now. Manufacturing starts in roughly twelve months.
Scaling isn’t just hardware though.
Healy says he needs operations staff. Two hundred maybe three hundred heads within the next year. The rest? That depends. Tulsa is the base. But eyes are on six other cities. Watch those numbers. If things click? Manna could be landing in those new spots by the end of 27.
The ambition is clear. They want to wrestle with the big dogs. Zipline. Amazon. Wing. That list feels heavy but Manna intends to jump in.
Why?
Consumers here are hungry for speed. Also the aggregators cleaned up their act. DoorDash. Uber Eats. They run tight ships. It’s easy to plug in when the ecosystem is solid. Manna knows how to plug.
Their drones don’t land. That’s key. They hover. Lower the goods on a tether. Same trick as the giants. But the money flows differently. They are delivery-as-a-service. Charge per flight. Sometimes via partners. Sometimes directly through their app. Hybrid approach. Flexible.
Home turf is quiet now.
Manna still keeps the R&D and admin in Ireland. But they paused delivery ops there. Why? Bureaucracy. Planning rules didn’t support the scale they wanted. So they pulled the plug on domestic flights last month.
Instead every resource is marching across the Atlantic.
Kenny Jacobs from Ryanair came over as executive chair. President. He drives the US charge. The political winds helped. The Trump administration. The FAA. They gave the industry what Healy calls a turbo boost.
It translates to money.
“We wouldn’t have grown here if the regs weren’t ready,” he says. “Now we put every penny into the USA.”
He sees Amazon and Wing surging. He knows Manna is slightly behind the curve.
So?
They plan to catch up fast. They aren’t strangers here. 2023 saw them launch in Dallas. AllianceTexas Mobility Zone. Now it’s the wider metro area. Dallas-Fort Worth is expanding. One step at a time.
The factory in Tulsa rises. The app downloads wait. Will the tethers hold? 🧵
