Irish Drone Delivery Startup Expanding To U.S. And Mainland Europe

One of the world’s most successful drone delivery companies will be expanding to mainland Europe and the United States in 2023. Manna Aero has already done over 100,000 drone deliveries in multiple locations in Ireland, and is trending to hit over 1,000 deliveries per day in individual dense urban markets.

But it won’t be instantly available everywhere. And Manna is not releasing its first target market in the U.S.

“Nobody is to go full throttle up scaling,” says CEO Bobby Healy on a recent TechFirst podcast. “We’re more interested in demonstrating we can operate in multiple markets, and that we can do, say, a thousand deliveries a day in a very dense area. And so that’s what we’ll be doing by this summer … in Dublin.”

Google sister company Wing is probably leading drone delivery in the U.S., right now, running deliveries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in addition to other locations in the U.S. and globally. Amazon’s drone delivery efforts are evolving slowly in comparison.

But Manna Aero has is approaching roughly similar scale to Wing, and has demonstrated the ability to do 2,000 to 3,000 flights/day across its multiple locations.

Each Manna Aero drone does 7-8 deliveries an hour at 50 miles/hour (80 km/hour) at a cost of roughly one-tenth a human driver in a car. The company’s latest drone, the X-drone, carries about 7.5 pounds (3.5 kg) of cargo in a hold with about 30,000 cubic centimeters of space (about 1800 cubic inches). It flies deliveries within a relatively small radius: perhaps up to five miles or eight kilometers, and returns home when battery consumption reaches 60%.

But Healy is appreciative of his competition, including Amazon, which has not demonstrated a ton of achievement yet in terms of number of deliveries.

“Hats off to Amazon,” he says. “It’s a wonderful piece of engineering, and nearly impossible what they’ve achieved with a copter design … and they’re not a private company like us. They don’t have the same need for pace as we do.”

Amazon’s drones so far suggest the company wants to solve for rural delivery, Healey says, where the efficiency of car or truck delivery drops off. Interestingly, that’s potentially what Wing is doing as well given the company has built hybrid aircraft that take off and land like drones but fly like airplanes with wings that make them much more efficient than pure drones.

Wing’s CEO recently said he expects to be capable of handling tens of millions of deliveries for millions of consumers by mid 2024.

Manna is in the process of obtaining FAA approval, so its successful operations in Ireland will be helpful.

“You don’t get permission to fly as the crow flies until you’ve done a lot of delivery flights,” Healy says. “While the regulations are black and white and there’s rules, there’s also a big element of, well, show me the proof.”

Manna’s plan is to attack dense urban centers in the U.S. Its experience in Europe, where urban density is significantly higher than in most of the United States, gives it an advantage, Healy thinks, in bringing drone delivery to American cities. Manna Aero is currently flying over urban densities of 10,000 people per square mile, he says, which is more dense than San Francisco.

“Everybody in San Francisco wants drone delivery,” Healy says. “Literally. So there’s such a need … both the problem to solve in terms of the economics of delivery and a customer need for it … everybody wants this thing to work.”

That said, there are still vested interests and competing priorities in governance, so there’s no slam dunk in terms of SF or NYC, for example.

But with the average premium for door-to-door delivery of food now at 50-60%, and with much of that food showing up in 20 or 30 minutes in less-than-perfect condition … there’s also pressure to make drone delivery more widely available.

“Our average flight time as of the last 12 months — wo a lot of data — two minutes, 40 seconds,” Healy says. “So nothing changes: your coffee is hot, your french fries are crunchy and hot … everything is the way it should be as if you ate it in the restaurant.”