Drone Startup Manna Completes First Delivery of a Samsung Phone in Ireland

Manna does drone-delivery-as-a-service. The Irish startup’s bespoke drones make 100+ commercial deliveries a day in Oranmore, Galway. In the 10,000-person town, nearly a third (30%) of households use the service. Manna’s newest gig is delivering Samsung products, and today, the startup completed its first consumer drop of a Galaxy phone.

“Drone delivery is just about getting things around. It could be a phone, a pint of ice cream, or a pint of blood,” Manna CEO Bobby Healy tells us. “We don’t care.”

His company’s mission of “replacing road-based delivery” is ambitious, to put it kindly. We stayed more grounded in our chat with Healy, focusing on technical nuts and bolts:

• What reliability thresholds are required for safe, at-scale drone deployment? Hint: The percentage requires a whole lot of 9s after the decimal.
• How do you make flying robots that people don’t hate? Hint: Shhhhhh.
• How’s the weather over there? We’ll just tell you the answer. “The worst...you could imagine,” Healy says.
• What’s next? A 40,000-person Irish town in the coming weeks. All of Ireland in ~1.5 years. And the US “very soon.”

Read the full Q&A here. —RD