Drone delivery company Manna has raised $30 million (€27.7 million) in funding as the company seeks to expand its business in Ireland and further afield.
The funding was led by existing investors Molten Ventures and Tapestry VC, with Enterprise Ireland, Coca-Cola HBC, Dynamo VC and Radius Capital also participating.
It brings to $60 million the total funding for the company, which has made more than 150,000 drone deliveries since it began testing the service.
The funding will be used to support the business’s expansion both in Ireland and the Nordics, where Manna recently began testing its services.
“It’s an important funding round. We’re starting our growth phase now,” said founder Bobby Healy. “We’ve signed JustEat, we’ve signed DoorDash, which are two of the biggest companies in the world for delivery. Now we want to do a little bit of growth, which is why we needed capital. It’s a great time for us.”
Manna currently offers drone delivery services in Blanchardstown, and is planning to expand to other sites in Dublin in the coming months, with Tallaght and Glasnevin already in the works. Mr Healy said it had a goal of covering 420,000 Eircodes in Dublin and beyond in 2025.
Founded in 2018 by Mr Healy, Manna has developed aviation-grade drones that fly at 80km/h and deliver goods including groceries, takeaways and medicines.
The drones can deliver orders in a 3km radius in less than three minutes, reducing congestion on roads and cutting carbon emissions associated with delivery vehicles. A single aircraft can do 100 deliveries a day, with up to 20 aircraft capable of being remotely managed by one Manna employee. To date, Manna has carried out more than 165,000 flights.
“We are thrilled to co-lead this round as Manna continues to redefine last-mile delivery,” said Patrick Murphy, a partner at Tapestry VC. “Their operational advancements and global expansion demonstrate the scalability of their model, which is truly transformative for communities and businesses alike. Bobby has assembled a top-class team to execute on this opportunity.”
Manna is planning further partnerships with global food delivery operators, and is looking at other European markets that could provide the opportunity to expand.
“We’re actively in conversations in the UK and we’re hoping to bring the service to the UK this year,” said Mr Healy. “Because of Brexit, it’s slightly disrupted on the regulatory side of things but in the last 12 months, they’ve been moving forward very quickly with a very, very ambitious regulatory programme that we think lends itself well now for us to open up an operation there.”
Mr Healy said that although Manna was operating in Texas, the US regulatory environment did not lend itself as well to drone delivery at scale.
“There’s a lot of noise about a lot of people talking about drone delivery in the United States but the truth is the EU is two or three years ahead of the US on readiness to regulate companies like ours,” he said.
“As excited as we are about our US operation in Texas, and we’ll continue expanding, the regulations are still not [there] in a way that companies like us could really, really scale across the country.”
