The time is around 4 pm on January 30th, 2020, the last hour of daylight on a bright but blustery day in late winter. Manna chief executive and founder Bobby Healy is fooling around pulling silly camp poses for the camera in a field in his back garden in Rathfarnham, Dublin. A white delivery drone hovers above his head. One of his own, of course.  

“This is for my gay fans,” he jokes as the photo session wraps up. Healy is a bit of a showman. But really, all eyes are on the drone which has just completed a successful demo for a small group of onlookers, hovering about 10 metres above the ground and dropping from a biodegradable thread a box containing tubs of Ben & Jerry ice cream. Members of the Manna team are on hand, uniformly togged out, like Healy, in white branded sports jackets.

It’s an enjoyable spectacle, part Willy Wonka, part Tomorrow’s World; the vanguard of what Healy hopes will be a delivery revolution involving fleets of autonomous boxy quadcopters flying takeaway food and much more besides in countries all around the world. 

“If it works, this will be by far the largest tech company Europe will have ever seen,” Healy once told me, all joking aside. “If it works,” he added. If it doesn’t work, fine. In a year, I’ll know.  But it’s so enormous that our route is going to be to IPO. In a small number of years, we’ll float.”

There is a mantric quality to this statement of intent, a focusing of the mind away from background chatter to meet the enormity of the business challenge facing Manna. The race to carve up the drone airspace and make efficient air deliveries a global reality for consumers is on. There is stiff competition out there from players like Wing, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, Zipline, and Flirtey.

Healy is well aware of this but presents as undaunted. He has a plan and he is sticking to it.

Last November, not long after Manna Drones was incorporated, the start-up raised €4.7 million in a round of seed funding led by US-based Dynamo Ventures, a VC firm that specialises in backing logistics and supply chain businesses. Other investors in Manna include Declan Ryan’s Irelandia Aviation, Frontline (which backed Google acquired Irish start-up Pointy), and PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. 

This was around the time when I first interviewed Healy at the Web Summit in Lisbon.

Then the coronavirus struck in March and everything changed. 

For Manna, that meant a pilot delivery programme that was due to be launched in UCD in conjunction with Just Eat, Camile Thai, and Ben & Jerry was put on ice.

In those early days of Covid-19, when even the national modern art museum was being repurposed as a morgue, the very idea of drones whirring above quiet Dublin suburbs delivering chow meins and pad thais to couples, singletons, and families in locked down neighbourhoods had an almost dystopian quality to it.

The next I heard last April was that Manna had teamed up with the HSE to trial medicine drone delivery drops in Moneygall. A sure sign of the times. 

Covid-19 has proved more of a business disruptor than any tech unicorn could boast. Some sectors like hospitality and travel have been disproportionately affected while others like pharmaceuticals and ecommerce are thriving. A year and a pandemic later, I was curious to catch up with the Manna CEO to find out if his electrifying ambition had held firm or whether it had been tempered by intervening events.

In a series of interviews, The Currency takes a year-long look at the founder of one of Ireland’s most intriguing and ambitious start-ups.

From the beginning

If you were to identify one single factor that gives credence to Healy’s conviction in his team’s ability to deliver a global venture, it would have to be his own track record. Manna is not his first rodeo and Healy himself is no young turk. At 51, he is a highly regarded businessman who is tech to the bone. (He prefers not to be called an entrepreneur.)

Healy is best known for his previous role as chief technology officer and co-founder of the phenomenally successful Dublin based travel car hire platform, CarTrawler.

Before that, he set up travel software firm Eland Technologies while living in Mexico in the 1990s. Before that again, he was in California writing video games for Nintendo through various subcontracts and a company called Broderbund. “I was the programmer at the bottom of the food chain that wrote the code;  the best work I ever did, the most fun,” he says.

His skills are in demand. Earlier this year, Healy was brought aboard troubled travel software company Datalex in an advisory capacity.  He is also a director of Chill Insurance. Last month, he stood down from the board of CarTrawler which recently sold a controlling stake for €100 million to UK private equity firm TowerBrook, so he could focus on Manna.

When I met Healy at the Web Summit last year, he was at the conference as a guest speaker. Instead of jetting in and out, the Manna founder opted to spend a week in and around Lisbon doing press and generally soaking up the atmosphere.

Our first conversation meandered from the brass tacks of the Manna business model, to lobbying, and the impact of foreign direct investment on domestic technology firms.

Francesca Comyn (FC): How long is it since you first started messing around with drones and thought ‘I can do something with this’?

Bobby Healy (BH): ‘Messing around with drones?’ That is actually what I was doing. I was farting around with drones. It’s been three years nearly to the day that I came up with the idea. And I nearly immediately sat down with the IAA (Irish Aviation Authority) to see, you know, is this dead on arrival? Or is this something that if we built it, would we ever be allowed to do it, and they were really receptive. They very clearly said: ‘Absolutely. If you can prove to us that it’s safe, then we will licence it’.

Manna’s commercial drones are built to cruise at heights of between 80 and 120 metres and can withstand 29-knot headwinds, an important factor if the business is to offer a reliable alternative to road deliveries. 

While the business is headquartered in Dublin, Healy has chosen to develop the hardware components of the Manna drone fleet in Pontypool, Wales, drawing on the aeronautical expertise of the nearby Airbus plant and the graduate talent (in subjects like robotics) from Cardiff University. The “avionic brain” of each drone is made up of three flight computers, any one of which can control the propellers. Heading up the software side is Alan Hicks who came from CarTrawler to fill the role of chief technology officer. 

Healy explains the rationale behind the dual location business model.

BH: Dublin is not a place for an indigenous tech company to grow anymore. It’s impossible. The IDA has been so bloody successful, bringing in FDI companies, they drowned out indigenous tech companies. CarTrawler wouldn’t work today if you tried it because the talent has just been sucked up. There is no talent and the talent that is there moves around too quickly. There are too many companies chasing the same talent pool. And so the result is you have cost inflation. That we can manage. But what you can’t manage is tenure. In CarTrawler our average tenure of engineers was six or seven years, and it’s crashed through the floor. It’s less than two years now. So you can’t build a software business.

FC: How much is it costing you to keep going at the development stage? 

BH: Nothing. We’re cheap, we’re burning about $200,000 a month. We have raised less than $10 million…when we’re really ready to go for it, things will change. Ireland is obviously a very small market. We could accomplish Ireland in less than $15 million but if we wanted to do the UK, we’re going to be raising between $500 and a billion dollars to do that. It’s a hugely capital intensive business, obviously, because you’re building drones, but also you’ve boots on the ground as well. And you couldn’t imagine a more difficult thing to scale because once we’ve got the R&D product completed then it’s an infrastructure play which is super difficult to do.

On a thread

FC: Bar the drones themselves, what other infrastructure is there?

BH: Say we’re Huawei rolling out 5g or Vodafone rolling out 5G, that’s the way you think about it. Our base serves a two kilometre radius, which is 12 square kilometres. We think we need about 700 of those bases in Ireland, right? So that’s 700 little teams you need to build and the governance around that. And then don’t forget, we’re an airline. So we’re licenced as an airline. So we have to have all the legal, the governance, the safety, the separation of duty, all these things that an airline has, we have to have an overlay onto a logistics company, which is what we really are. So, there’s an overhead there.  But in the end, we are pretty certain that it’s a very high margin business, it just has, upfront, the giant overhead relating to safety and governance.

FC: Are these infrastructure points potentially controversial? 

BH: You won’t see them. I mean the future of food is going dark kitchens anyway (delivery only takeaways). So when we go live in Dublin, it’ll be with a dark kitchen. So you don’t see the food. You don’t see the drones, nothing. You will order with your favourite ordering app, and off you go.

FC: So where will it land?

BH: It’ll land in your garden in your front or back garden or on top of your car if you don’t have a big garden okay. 

FC: So it’s literally the same as answering the door. 

BH: It’s better.

FC: And what about the drones, are they partly off the shelf or are you making them from scratch?

We’re going to be burning money like you’ve never seen money burnt

Bobby Healy

BH: We’re building our own airframe, everything. We buy the components, like the motors, the propellers and all that stuff, right. Ours is a funny drone. So you buy a DJI drone, it’s great. You fly it 10,000 times without a problem. But 10,001 it’ll fall out of the sky. That’s not acceptable for what we’re doing. So we’ve a weird drone with loads of redundancy, loads of extra hardware, that just guarantees that it’s safe.

FC: What size is it?

BH: It’s 2.9 metres, it’s the same size, exactly the same size as a seagull

A very high margin business

FC: What about the takeaway businesses? Is there buy-in to your product?

BH: They are beating down our doors. We see ourselves as logistics so we expect that all of the major brands will work with us. Because ultimately, if you look at Ireland, we’ve Just Eat, we’ve Deliveroo, and we’ve Uber Eats. None of them can deliver to my house in Rathfarnham. It doesn’t work, because the population density in Rathfarnham doesn’t support delivery and it’s not profitable. When they work with us, they can go to the entirety of Ireland, they are now digital businesses, they don’t need any footprint on the ground.

FC: How fast can you deliver?

BH: Three minutes maximum delivery time. We’ve made an agreement with a huge worldwide brand of dark kitchens. They’re going to plant dark kitchens everywhere and we just put our drone delivery on top. And theirs is a very high margin business, but they don’t do delivery. So now we could allow them to roll out in far less population-dense areas and remain profitable. To be honest with you –  there hasn’t been a company on the restaurant chain or delivery side, we’ve spoken to that hasn’t said yes. 

FC: When do you think you could get to a stage where your company’s profitable?

BH: Never. We should never be profitable. Think about it. If we roll out Ireland, and we did nothing else, we’d be profitable in 12 months right? But what we want to do is grow as fast and as quickly as possible to every city in the world that lets us fly. We’re going to be burning money like you’ve never seen money burnt. The states (USA) are our most important market. And so we’re working with the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority). We expect to be licenced to do a launch there next year.

The FAA has given UPS a drone airline licence, which allows UPA to fly any number of aircraft, anywhere they want, whenever they want. That’s earth shattering for the drone delivery world. The FAA are the most conservative, most respected aviation authority in the world, and they’re saying, go for it. It’s huge, huge news.

FC: I presume there’s competition.

BH: Well we don’t compete with UPS. Right now, no-one is competing with us, except a small company called Alphabet that own Google. They’ve got a drone delivery programme called Wing, and it’s beautiful. It’s really good. They’ve exactly the same strategy as us except think of us as the arms dealer  – where we’re powering the restaurant. Every distribution channel can use those drones. Whereas Wing are only powering their own restaurants, their own consumers and they’re competing with everybody. And we’re the antidote. So Deliveroo are threatened by Wing, Uber are threatened by Wing, Just Eat are threatened by them. And we’re the answer. Because if consumers get drone delivery from Wing, they’re never going to use Deliveroo again, until they get drone delivery. And we are the answer to that.

FC: What if kids throw rocks at the drones or try to take them out?

BH: We don’t land. The drones hover about 10 to 12 metres. Kids are going to love it. And we’re gonna dress them up as Santa Claus for Christmas. Yeah, I mean, you can hit them with a rock. We’ll win. There’s kevlar underneath it. So we think it’s impossible to take it down but famous last words, right? 

The farmers, the builders, everyone knows about lobbying. We’re too posh to lobby.

Bobby Healy

FC: And you’re going to trial it in Dublin?

BH: We’re going to deliver to an audience, a suburban audience of about 20,000 to 30,000 people. We’ll run it for a few weeks. What we want to do is show it to Ireland. We don’t want to just roll it out. We’re going to show it to Ireland and then let’s have the debate. Okay, how do you feel about it flying over your house with someone else’s hamburger? 

FC: It’s not noisy?

BH: You can’t hear it all. But everyone has questions and we don’t want to just fly ahead and insult everyone’s intelligence by rolling it out. So what we’re going to do is a couple of thousand, maybe 10,000, deliveries get everyone involved  – Joe Duffy the whole lot. Right. And let’s talk about it and take on the detractors, have the discussion and then push the button with an eye to having it fully deployed in a year. That’s like 80 per cent of Ireland covered in less than 18 months.

This could be the thing I’ve always wanted to do

Our conversation turns back to Healy’s thoughts on doing business in Ireland. The tech founder has gripes about the capital gains tax regime but was heartened by budgetary improvements last year to the Key Employee Engagement Programme (KEEP) which spares employees from having to pay tax on share options in certain cases although capital gains tax is charged when the shares are sold.

FC: You were talking about FDI and staff retention, more generally what do you think about the business environment in Ireland at the moment?

BH: I think it’s great. I think Ireland’s the best it’s ever been. I’m 50 now (his birthday is in December). I’ve been through two generations. It’s never been so good. The budget did some very good things as well. The most important thing to change is the stock options that allow us to incentivize employees. It’s not gone the whole way but it’s a signal at least that there is a willingness by government to allow start-ups to remunerate employees with stock options in a more flexible way. And that’s huge. 

FC: How did that come about? Were there lobbying efforts?

BH: Yeah, Scale Ireland is a lobby group out of Dogpatch (start-up hub). They’ve done a really good job. And I think it’s a direct result of the lobbying, that it’s happened. And the tech industry, the indigenous tech industry is pretty shite at lobbying. The farmers, the builders, everyone knows about lobbying. We’re too posh to lobby. You know, we think everyone should just realise how great we are, and it’s juvenile. We’ve been juvenile about it. Government is to be respected and they’re a partner and we need to help them understand what will work and that’s what lobbying has done. So it’s the right path. I’m happy about that. I mean, the thing about CGT (capital gains tax), it personally annoys the hell out of me but that’s a private thing for me, and I’m not about to say that the government should reduce CGT, you know, to help poor ol’ guys like me to be richer. 

CGT though is more of a signal of our willingness to support entrepreneurs. And that one makes me uncomfortable because if I founded this business in the UK, you know me personally, I would pay a fraction of the taxes, right? But I’m still in Ireland because I don’t care ultimately. You’re Irish, you’re growing a business in Ireland. That’s that, that’s the way it is. But it’s a bit of an insult, right, that I’m compared to someone who sits on a piece of land, you know. It’s a bit of an insult. 

And I think we need to just be a little bit more respectful to the indigenous tech industry to say ‘we’re here, we’re thinking about ways to help you. Enterprise Ireland has been really good for us, me personally helping in our businesses and stuff but the IDA are just stronger. So we respect FDI companies a lot more than we do indigenous tech.

I mean, I’ve only ever worked with EI and I’m delighted with them, genuinely, without naming names. I’ve had doors knocked down by Enterprise Ireland around the world. And, you know, a small company  – even with CarTrawler which was a big company – we still lean on EI to help us and there’s that stamp of respectability. They’re an unusual beast because they’re full of very entrepreneurial people. In San Francisco, the people they have over there, they’re unreal, they’re plugged in and they’re so enthusiastic. That’s a powerful weapon that we have, but that’s the only one. Everything after that, it’s not a level playing field.

An FDI company comes in and takes away all our engineers, there’s nothing we can do about that. And we’re building indigenous businesses right here in Ireland and abroad and I just think we could do a little bit better at supporting that. If I were in charge, and I admit I’d be a shite politician, I’d look at how we grow outside of Dublin and incentivise that way. That would really help I think.

Pointy, the retail tech start-up bought by Google earlier this year, the Amazon backed tech support platform Sweepr and Cubic Telecom are among his favourite domestic firms. I ask Healy what he brings to his own business.  He tells me: “What I’m good at is building teams of people. They do all the hard work and I lead them. I’m the pretty face.” Financially, he will only confirm that he has pumped somewhere between €1 and €10 million into Manna.

FC: Would you sell out, down the line?

BH: No. I mean I’ve always rolled the dice. Always. For 30 years, I’ve been throwing it all in. And, you know, this is unusual. I mean, I’ve taken a few quid out of  CarTrawler, and I sold my last business before that, Eland. And certainly, I made some cash out of these things. But this thing is different. This is not an ego thing. This is for me. This could be the thing I’ve always wanted to do. It’s so enormous. And we’re in a really unusual space where we’re the first. We now have a record that people want to back us. And if it works, it is by far the largest tech company Europe will ever have seen. If it works. 

At home

Behind a high wall and imposing electronic gates, a long, tree-lined drive sweeps up to an impressive Victorian residence. But it’s only the facade. Inside, modernity reigns. 

Formerly owned by the British embassy, and later Nama, Healy’s stately home in Rathfarnham was gutted by fire while unoccupied a decade ago. Afterwards, only the granite shell of this once listed building remained.

Healy bought the estate a couple of years later and built from the ruins a modern home he hopes will stand for 200 years. “It was built in 1860 and all the trees were planted then, so they’re all the same age. They’re all dying at the moment. We’re losing loads,” he tells me. He says they keep planting more.

Healy’s brother and family live nearby. Even in January, the glass-covered courtyard with a wood-fired pizza oven and a long wooden trellis table evokes warm, late summer nights with friends and extended family.

There are nods to the past in the granite cobblestone paving outside the main entrance and in the parquet floors, gilt-edged chairs, occasional tables and wooden panelled windows in the main reception rooms. These are juxtaposed with clean modern plasterwork and some novelty kitsch, like the maximalist (and well-stocked) copper ceilinged bar and the indoor fake palm tree. These touches, along with a drum kit (belonging to Healy – “I’m shite at them but I’m getting better”) and a piano in the corner of the sitting room, give a relaxed feel to what is a very grand house. 

As this is pre-Covid, there are a lot of people milling around when I arrive which adds to the sense of informality. 

Most of the visitors are Manna connected. But not all. A friend arrives and is warmly congratulated on selling a business she was an investor in the previous day.

A drone sits in the kitchen allowing for an up-close inspection. They are designed to carry weights of up to two kilos and to travel at 80 kilometres per hour into Irish weather 99.3% of the time.

It’s Thursday, and they’ve spent the week running a series of demos, mostly for the benefit of their launch partners and investors. 

Every run of test flights requires approval from the Irish Aviation Authority. Before I get to see the drone in action, I take the opportunity to catch up with Healy and the latest Manna developments. This time he has a PR person with him.

An aviation company with shipping containers

FC: You completed a seed round of funding there recently. When is the next batch coming? 

BH: Yeah, that’s right. So we’re going to go live in Dublin in March. And we’re going to do a couple of thousand deliveries. And I want to get that finished, behind us, show the numbers on it and then we’ll raise more capital, which will conclude by the middle of the year. We’re targeting June, maybe July.

FC: What are you looking for?

BC: The actual amount? We don’t know. it’ll look like a large series A round. So you’d probably expect 15 to $20 million, something like that. 

(The pandemic put the brakes on that round of funding this year)

FC: In terms of your partners (such as Just Eat, Camille Thai), are you lending these drones out or how does the service work? 

BH: If you’re a large restaurant and you have 300 to 400 deliveries a day, we’ll put down one of our units, like it’s half a shipping container, in your car park. We’ll take three car parking spaces. And that’s it, we do the whole thing. It’s just like a normal online order, but instead of an address for the customer, it will be the registration of the drone. And so the restaurant says, ‘Oh, look, it’s burger and fries for this drone’. And they make the burger and fries and they hand it out the window to our team that load it on the drone.

The unit can take 10 to 12 drones which can do about 50 to 60 or more deliveries per hour. And we’ll have two people for safety managing those drones.

FC: Is that staff heavy?

BH: Absolutely. It’s still extremely profitable on a unit basis. But it’s staff heavy  – not because we need that – we can completely do it robotically but we don’t want to let restaurants do any of the management of the drones.

We’re an aviation company. We’re licenced by a regulator as an airline and an airport and an aircraft manufacturer all in one. So you don’t let untrained people operate any of the technology. So we centrally operate the entire fleet. And then in each location, you basically have two safety people there. They won’t always be there, they’ll ultimately go away. And the thing will be fully robotic. So it will be that the restaurant staff puts the food in a little tube and it gets sucked up to the aircraft. But we don’t want to do that yet, because we’re going to move very cautiously. You know, the terminology that the whole industry uses is crawl, walk, run. And we’re in crawl phase now, which means we’re babysitting everything.

FC: Why did you decide to go with food? There are loads of things you could do with drones.

BH: Yeah. There are many reasons. First financially, food is the number one product in terms of volume needs, and the more volume you can bring to the aircraft the quicker it pays for itself. The expected volume we’ll get from food will be 90 per cent utilisation of the aircraft. You’ll essentially be paying down the full capital cost of the aircraft in six months by doing constant deliveries five to six hours a day, four or five deliveries per hour per aircraft. So it’s really the fastest way to reduce your debt overhead on the aircraft. It’s just like filling a plane with passengers the way Ryanair do. 

So that’s one very brute force simple reason for it but the other reasons are just as important, but not as obvious. And the main one is the benefit we bring to food delivery. It is not just speed  – that is obviously huge, and costs and scalability are huge, but the quality. You’ll hear people that never ordered pasta by road. And the reason is that it takes 40 minutes by road. And pasta after 10 minutes, it’s horrible. You can’t deliver pasta. But if you have a drone doing it and it takes two to three minutes to deliver, it’s still pasta. Crones when applied to food delivery, completely transform the quality of the product. Therefore they increase consumption and demand. 

More than food

FC: Do you see yourself being more ambitious and diversifying in a few years time, if the food delivery gets off the ground? 

BH: Yeah. I wouldn’t see it as diversification. I would see it as a broadening of the offering. And absolutely, we do that very early actually. So when we roll out a town, we will roll out initially with what are the major food brands in the town who want to deliver and we put the infrastructure in place. We’ll immediately include the local convenience, the local over the shelf pharmacy. Everything that the local economy needs, we want to put in that central location and make it easy to access and we want we’re not going to do that ourselves. We’re going to do that with partners.

But what we want to do is get the infrastructure in place and let the local economy, the town of 25, 50, 100 thousand people decide for themselves what they want to do. It’s their infrastructure, we provide it. To each of the towns that we power, we charge a per delivery charge. We know that the local butcher is going to want to do it, we know that the local vegetable guy and the local Spar whatever, it’s essentially a way to make it far more accessible to get to your local vendors rather than having to do a weekly shop where you go out with a car, you spend half a day filling the car with stuff, and you waste 30 per cent of what you bought.

I mean, I’ve small children and one of the nightmares with small children is they get a fever. You’re filling them full of Calpol all night long. So it’s those little cases where you’ve no calpol and it’s after 8pm and there are no pharmacies open. So you can get your Calpol in three minutes.

FC: So, Manna willl have a supply?

BH: Yeah. So you’d go drone delivery, and you’d go to your local pharmacy, which is actually our container in the middle of the town, right? 

If you look at what Alphabet have done. Alphabet have done a deal with Walgreens. And so you can order everything from Walgreens through their drone delivery programme. We will do the same.

We think it’s an invalid use of drones and the airspace to collect customer data or to record anything

It’ll just change the nature of how people get things into their house. So instead of loads of things at once, with a lot of waste and other storage, it will be just what you need exactly when you need it and the smallest version of it. So instead of four litres of milk, every time you go to the shop, it’s a pint of milk or half pint of milk. Everything’s going to be fresher and better. And we can do that so much more efficiently and in so much more scalable a way that we can also reduce on packaging because if you want milk, we don’t need to send you a giant big expensive brand.

FC: Don’t Tesco, for example, build in delivery prices to their offering?

BH: I think they charge you below a certain basket value. We’re not going to change the price so whatever you’re currently paying today for delivery, that’s going to be what you continue paying.

FC: What’s your max weight?

BH: We can vary that. For food, we’ll choose a two kilo cut off limit as 90 plus per cent of food orders today go at less than one and a half kilos. 

Healy explains that Manna will be targeting urban areas outside city centres, like Tallaght, Portumna or Tralee. Densely populated city streets are problematic for delivery purposes.

A partnership with Cubic Telecom will provide reliable communications technology to navigate deliveries. Hand on heart, Healy says the one thing he will not be doing is collecting data.

BH: We have zero interest in collecting data. We’re a logistics platform. We don’t know your name, we don’t know your email, your phone number, your IP. We know nothing about you except where you’ve told us to put the food. So all the data on our aircraft is one location, where we’re going, that’s all we know. We’ve zero interest in consumer data. We’re firm on that and we will never change from that. We don’t compete with Alphabet, or when Amazon do drone delivery. This isn’t a bash off them, but those are information gathering companies. That is what they do. That is their DNA. And we think that’s a mistake in the drone space. We think it’s an invalid use of drones and the airspace to collect customer data or to record anything. We think that’s a very bad thing for the industry. And we have no intention of collecting information.

Green jersey blues

Following an intervention from his PR representative, Healy agrees that he doesn’t know if these companies are collecting data specifically in the drone space. 

The conversation then moves to politics and policy. I pick up on our previous conversation and ask Healy if he thinks Irish governments are in thrall to multinationals.

BH: I love the multinationals. I think they’re great. They’ve always been great, but you need a balanced strategy. And indigenous tech companies have not been given the right level of attention by government compared to FDI companies. I  think the IDA have done a fantastic job, but it’s hurt the indigenous tech industry. It’s going to smother – it has smothered – the indigenous tech industry. So let’s fix that. Let’s have a good policy for widening out to outside of Dublin, for example. There are a lot of things that it would be easy to do and a lot of things it would be hard to do. But housing has been a real problem. And a lack of strategy around stock options and those kinds of things that we would use to reduce our wage bill and incentivise staff, it’s been non existent. The UK are better than us. The Brits are better. Sorry. The French are better, the Germans, the Portuguese. I could go through the list of Europe. We’re pretty low down the league. It’s embarrassing.

Maybe the country needs a tech-based CTO or a tech-based TD that actually understands what it takes

FC: You need to manufacture as well. Where would you go?

BH: You know, Ireland was great; textiles, the good old days with low-cost manufacturing. And that’s not a great industry for any economy, but high-quality engineering like what Intel are doing in Leixlip, that’s an area where public policy could really change things. For now, we’re building our drones in Wales. we’ve fantastic support there. But we’re tiny. When we get to scale and we’re building a hundred thousand drones, which require two and a half thousand people, we will just look around then and say, ‘right, where should we be? What is the best place?’ Because we don’t think with a green jersey. Nobody thinks with their green jersey, they think with their company jersey, and they say, what is the best place to get this done?

I’m not speaking about Manna in particular, I’m speaking just in general about Dublin/Ireland tech. Policy needs to cop on and start looking at what the rest of Europe’s doing. We need to foster an indigenous tech industry. And right now, we either haven’t got the political will to do it or the political understanding to do it. And that’s a feature of the Irish environment where if you stick your head up and say we want to give stock, we want to incentivise people to use stock options to do things, everyone thinks greedy, greedy, capitalists. Bad, bad, bad. 

We need a bit of an education around what stock options are. They help companies to grow by reducing their costs. So there’s just a bit of leadership required, you know, a bit of understanding. So maybe the country needs a tech-based CTO or a tech-based TD that actually understands what it takes. But they certainly don’t engage with us in any way. My best engagement is we work with Enterprise Ireland and they’re awesome because they connect us around the world everywhere we want to be connected. They’re an extension of our business and they are doing a great job but they can’t protect us from just a complete saturation in the country of FDI companies.  We need leadership at the top level for that. 

The seagull

Outside the small crowd watches as the four propellers spin and the mini aircraft rises vertically off the grass to a height of around 10 metres. Miles, one of the Manna team, explains the demo.

“It has been extremely windy. You can see the clouds are moving at quite a pace. We’re very sheltered here but there’s a lot of turbulence. So we’re going to be flying quite low today because we’re in the IAA’s controlled airspace.”

I am informed that they will be barely visible in the sky when flying at their regulated height.

Whatever about the noise when flying at 80 metres, at 10 metres the drone sounds like a very small helicopter (or in this case, quadcopter); hardly a racket, but considerably louder than the insect whine of smaller retail products.

The drone hovers for a few seconds, before the hatch opens. It all goes smoothly.

Afterwards, I take a lift in a Tesla with his PR reps into town. As we go back down the long driveway, they point out the treehouse and wooded area where Healy has traditionally thrown a charity fundraising party every year.

The electric gates stubbornly refuse to open on the way out. We take turns hopping out of the car and flailing our arms in front of the sensor until bingo it opens and we’re back out in the Dublin suburbs.

New times

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my final interview with Bobby Healy takes place remotely. At 10am Wednesday last week, we logged in to Google meet. Healy is in the server room at his home which he uses as an office. The backdrop is austere in its simplicity. Unlike our previous encounters, we are very much in routine business hours.

Healy appears in good spirits. He says while Covid has been “pretty ugly obviously”, it’s been an enabler for the drone delivery space even if it has thrown some of the company’s timelines out of kilter. “The pandemic forces people to think differently. That’s the main thing. People are forced to consider different futures, or different ways of thinking,” he says.

The Manna CEO is ready to capitalise on this paradigm shift for business purposes. Since Covid struck, the headcount at Manna has doubled to 34. The vast majority of those staff are software and hardware engineers working in Dublin and Wales.  Since our last meeting, the assembly of the drone carcass has been outsourced to Eirecomposites, a company based in Spiddal, Co Galway that has manufactured components for Bombardier.

There is also an entirely new project in the works that he only hints at. We are casually talking about him stepping down from the board of CarTrawler last month when Healy excitedly announces he has another trick up his sleeve for the travel technology space. “Something very big and very disruptive,” is all he adds when I push him. “That’s it. That’s all I can tell you.” The voice of his PR agent, who has been silently on the call with his camera switched off, interrupts the interview to make sure no beans get spilt etc.

Healy sounds like he would love to talk about his new project but instead we cover more familiar territory such as drone testing in Moneygall and Healy’s concerns around Brexit and what it all might mean for an Irish company with a base in Wales. 

“It could go in any direction, we don’t know. There’s no clarity, certainly not from the Brits, on whether our drones can cross borders, whether there’ll be a tax on them. All these things, we just don’t know. But if I look at threats or worries for the business, it’s not around the pandemic – that’s neutral to positive for us. It’s horrible to say but that’s calling it. But Brexit is a potential real problem for us.”

On the Moneygall front, the feedback was positive, Healy says. Around 95 per cent of households in the village used the service and only two out of 350 households voiced complaints which appear to have been of a boilerplate anti-drone variety.

Now it is time to move testing up a gear. Manna is bound for Oranmore which has nearly 3,000 homes. Again there will be an emphasis on delivering medical supplies including coronavirus test kits and care packs. Tesco is on board so small “single basket” grocery drops weighing mostly around the two kilos mark are also in the pipeline along with the odd garda community information leaflet.

Healy says Covid-19 has allowed drone deliveries to be reevaluated as an important service.

The aim of the tests over the next six months is twofold; to stress test the service and make sure the drones can pull-off the 100 to 200 flights per day from the base. Secondly, Healy wants to find out how customers, when offered a range of services, actually use drone delivery. Moneygall with a parish population of around 1,600 was just too small to allow Manna to draw meaningful conclusions from the data. Locals used Manna – which had a phone line to make sure elderly people could access the service- for the sake of it, because it was a novelty.

FC: Last November, you said you’d know in a year whether Manna was going towards an IPO, whether it was going to be the biggest thing ever, or if it was not going to work. Would you still stand by that statement or have events overtaken you?

BH: I think we’re actually more confident now in where we are. There was a lot of, I won’t call it uncertainty, but there were a lot of things we had to prove that we’ve now proven that resolve a lot of the risk around space and around business -ie will we be given permission to do what we’re doing and the answer is yes. Will we be able to build an aircraft that meets the requirements, which is no mean feat, and the answer is yes. We can now, as we’ve done in Moneygall and as we’re going to be doing shortly in Oranmore, we’re now flying full distance, carrying all the produce –  bigger and heavier products than we thought. 

The difficult engineering question has been answered. Can we build an aircraft for the right price? Can it operate a delivery for the right price? So a huge part of the execution list in a technology business, we’ve answered and the answer is very good.

FC: To use that annoying word -have you had to pivot? In the sense that I got a strong impression the priority was takeaway food delivery but the Galway test is a partnership with Tesco if I understand correctly. 

BH: I don’t know how we ended up being called the food delivery company. We were always delivering everything to everyone. Our mission is we want to carry everything from everywhere to everybody in the community. So like if you look at Oranmore, we’re delivering pharmacy, first and foremost and second Covid related products like Covid test kits Covid advice packs. We’re delivering information from the garda with every delivery, we’re delivering Tesco of course. We’re delivering lots of food products and we’re delivering hardware store products.

Healy says they are working with the Galway Chamber of Commerce, the residents association, and all of the local retailers. The Manna station will be based on the roof of Tesco and the delivery options will be extensive.

FC:  I remember when we were in your backyard during testing, it was quiet up to a point but it was not that quiet when the drone came down low. Presumably they typically stay a good bit higher so that kind of noise intrusion doesn’t come into play.

BH: When you saw it in my garden that was at four to five metres. Yeah, you’ll hear it. We deliver at 15 metres. And the most important thing is the propellers, not to get too technical, but they spin at 50 hertz or 50 times a second. So you combine eight props at 50 times per second you get a sound that’s exactly identical to an idling diesel engine.

A lot of startups will do anything to get the first dollar of revenue. We didn’t and won’t take that approach

The most important thing is that the sound doesn’t go through glass. So if you order something at 9pm, and your neighbor’s kids are asleep in bed, they won’t hear it. They can’t hear it. Even at 15 metres you’ll hear it but you know without exception, when we show people the aircraft doing a delivery at our delivery height, all the comments are the same. ‘Wow, I’m impressed with the sound that doesn’t sound like normal drones, normal drones are really noisy’. So, we know we’ve solved that so that I’m not concerned about. And there are standards in aviation, specifically in the drone side of aviation that address noise levels and noise quality that we passed with flying colours.

Charting his own course

I ask Healy how the commercial drone space has changed recently with the likes of the Bono backed medical drone delivery firm Zipline announcing a partnership with Walmart. Then there’s Google’s Wing. Substantial players with big funding. By contrast, Manna’ plan for a Series A funding round last summer has been put back until next year. 

Where does Manna fit in? Where is the path forward?

BH: A business like ours needs a lot of capital to start to scale it. We’re not ready to scale it yet.  Zipline are, they’ve been doing it longer, and they’ve raised I think 180 to $200 million dollars. We will be like that, we’ll probably need to raise more. In the end, if you take a market like Ireland, you probably need about 30 to $50 million to roll out across Ireland in the UK you need about 300 or $400 million to roll out just one market. So it’s a very capital hungry business but also it will be a gigantically profitable space for everyone –  for the restaurants and suppliers that we provide the service for, and anyone that operates drone delivery. In the end, what you’re doing is, you’re going to increase demand through increased consumption because of the service which creates better businesses, more profitable businesses. A business in a suburb now that might serve a catchment of two square miles now gets to serve 20 square miles with the same product.

FC: Why aren’t you ready, when do you reckon you will be ready, and what is the gap to be jumped?

BH: We’re not in a rush to scale and, you know, we need to proceed very carefully. We’ve 22,000 flights on the clock. And what we are about now is proving that the world wants this, collecting that data and understanding what it looks like. Until you’re sure of everything, you don’t scale the business. You test, you test, you test until you have all of the aspects or facets of the business fully understood in data, and that means aircraft performance, it means aircraft safety, it means noise profile, it means consumer feedback, consumer response rate. 

All those things will take us at least another 12 to 18 months to fully prepare for scale. Where we will scale it, I can’t tell you. There’s a number of markets that are very receptive and want us to start rolling out the product. But as I said we’re not ready.

And, you know, honestly, if we’re successful this will be the biggest technological company Ireland will have ever seen, by far, it’s just that the space is so large and it’s so clear to see where the margin comes from and what it will look like that it’s important to proceed cautiously. What I mean by that is we take a ton of investor cash – as we will do  – we need to be certain about the output of that cash that we have a very well defined project that’s ready and industrially configured to scale.

We’re not in the business of taking cash to probe and meander and go down different avenues. We’re not like that. We’re about executing on a known plan and that means you proceed cautiously with a data led approach.

Right now, we’re delivering longer distances, heavier cargo, more frequently than anyone else. And the only one that’s coming close to that is Zipline which do long range vaccine flights. But Zipline are doing at peak, 300 deliveries a day. We’re flying 500 to 700 flights per day. Commercially Moneygall would be less than 50, Oranmore would be 100 to 150. But that’s a company [Zipline] that’s valued at $2 billion.

The aviation testing process is deliberative, boring even, removed from the build it fast, break it, fix it mentality of pure software development. It is an exercise in discipline and consistency, and Healy has full faith in his experienced team to deliver. His ambition and confidence is intact.

BH: We’re not geniuses we just know from the benefit of experience we avoid some mistakes that other start-ups will make. It doesn’t mean much more than that but it is important because, you know, the temptation for us would have been to copy others to copy Zipline or to copy Matternet or whatever. That’s about having discipline in your strategy and focus. 

A lot of startups will do anything to get the first dollar of revenue. We didn’t and won’t take that approach. We’ll build a good business case and build a good team, and get investors to back us for the right product, not for whatever can pay the bills. As I said, it is not our first rodeo so we know the benefit of focusing on a single core strategy and since I started this business three years ago the strategy and the detail of that have not changed one single bit.