Europe’s largest drone delivery operator, Manna Drone Delivery, says it has officially commenced US operations by delivering Halloween candy to families in the Dallas/Fort Worth area by drone.
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Manna, a drone delivery startup with Irish roots, is expanding to the US market with strategic investment from Coca-Cola HBC, the bottling partner of The Coca-Cola Company. Manna says it has partnered with multinational real estate development company Hillwood to initially serve 10,000 residents in Texas’ Dallas-Ft. Worth area.
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As indicated just last month, drone delivery specialist Wing has begun demonstration flights in a northern suburb of Dublin as a walk-up to full services it has planned next year for Ireland’s capital, and beyond.
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In the third and last installment of DroneDJ’s interview with Bobby Healy, the irrepressible Manna Aero CEO pivots from his plans to introduce drone delivery around Europe to discuss his strategy for launch in the potentially enormous US market. That involves certification of Manna’s proprietary UAVs; introduction and expansion of drone transport through widening suburban “cohorts of scale”; and raising the considerable capital that will require with, most likely, a Wall Street flotation. Should he get the company there, Manna might well have reached the solid, advanced state of growth to allow Healy to move on to his next challenge.
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Manna Aero CEO Bobby Healy is preparing to nearly quadruple the company’s current potential client base in Ireland with the start of drone deliveries in a large Dublin-area town in a few months. From there, he plans to launch activity in European Union nations he considers ready for aerial services. Healy tells DroneDJ in the second part of our interview why he believes its regulations put the EU in particularly strong position to take the global lead in emerging UAV-based services; how Manna’s full-stack drone manufacturing and operation model gives it a business advantage; and why a trained programmer who successfully built two tech travel sector companies decided drone deliveries would be his next challenge.
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Tech entrepreneur Bobby Healy’s objective is as simple as it is enormous. He wants to use the momentum he’s created establishing Manna Aero as Ireland’s hottest aerial tech business to transform it into the biggest and best drone delivery company on the planet. And to do that, he’s readying its launch across the European Union in the coming months, with the US following hard on that.
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It’s a historic day for the European drone industry. Ireland-based Manna Aero has become the first-ever operator to receive the much-coveted “light UAS operator certificate” (LUC) that would allow the drone delivery startup to self-authorize operations across the European Union.
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Manna, an Ireland-based drone delivery startup, has scooped up $25 million in Series A funding to scale its fleet and expand into the US market. And to head its US operations, the company has quietly roped in Andrew Patton, the former Lead of Strategy and Growth at Wing, a Google-developed drone delivery company.
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Samsung Electronics Ireland has signed a deal with drone delivery company Manna Aero to deliver its Galaxy phones by drone. The new delivery service is just another in the long list Manna Aero has been setting live throughout Ireland.
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