If you’re in a Dublin suburb and want coffee, it could be delivered to your door by drone. At a mall, an employee at Irish startup Manna will pick up a cup of hot coffee from a coffee shop in the mall, put it in a bag, place the bag in a detachable battery-powered bin, attach it to a delivery drone, and in less than three minutes, the beverage will “land” in your garden.
Coffee is the No. 1 product delivered by Manna, which says that demand for morning and afternoon coffee and the clever design of its drone help it maintain a steady delivery pace and operate with fewer staff and drones than its giant competitors, including Amazon and Alphabet, as well as “unicorn” Zipline.
These companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting drone deliveries, but Manna’s bold founder, Bobby Healy, says his company is the only one making a profit on each delivery.
Big money doesn’t seem to be an advantage in this case. In a startup, the key is to develop a cheap, reliable drone and operate it with as few people as possible. And then, convince regulators that you can fly it safely in residential neighborhoods.
Manna has raised $60 million, including a new $30 million funding round announced Wednesday led by Molten Ventures and Tapestry VC. Manna is valued at more than $150 million. Manna’s revenue in 2024 was $6 million. Since it launched in 2020, Manna has made 200,000 deliveries – far fewer than its competitors:
- Zipline has made 1.4 million deliveries, mostly of medical supplies and equipment in Africa,
- Wing 450,000 deliveries in Australia, the US and the UK,
- and Amazon vaguely refers to “thousands of deliveries”.
Manna is set to expand its operations this year to the Dublin suburbs, serving 1.1 million residents. 42% of households in the Dublin neighborhoods served by Manna have used the service at least once. He estimates that Manna will grow its deliveries to an annual rate of more than 1.5 million – a rate that no other drone delivery company has achieved to date.
