Why an Irish Drone Startup Is Looking to Oklahoma for Its Future
Manna, the Irish drone delivery company that made headlines for pioneering autonomous food and parcel delivery over Irish skies, is executing a significant strategic pivot — redirecting its operational energy and investment capital toward the United States. Specifically, the company is targeting the American Southwest as its primary growth corridor for drone delivery US expansion, with Tulsa, Oklahoma set to become its first full-scale US hub. For IT decision-makers, policy professionals, and entrepreneurs tracking the intersection of aviation tech, regulatory frameworks, and logistics infrastructure, this move carries implications that extend well beyond a single company's growth strategy.
The story of Manna's westward shift is, at its core, a story about regulation — or the absence of it. According to reporting by Silicon Republic, Manna announced a "strategic pause" in its Irish operations last month, citing what it described as a lack of a clear national framework surrounding drone technology in Ireland. In its place, the company is now channelling resources into markets where, in its own words, "regulatory and planning frameworks are advancing and commercial drone delivery is accelerating." That means the US, the UK, and other international markets — not, for now, the country where Manna was born.
Founder and CEO Bobby Healy told TechCrunch that Manna plans to establish a US operations and manufacturing centre in Tulsa that will employ approximately 1,000 people over the next several years. Manufacturing at the new facility — currently under construction — is expected to begin within about a year, giving the company time to scale its operations team to between 200 and 300 people before full production ramps up.
Why Tulsa? The Strategic Logic Behind Manna's US Drone Hub
Tulsa is Oklahoma's second-largest city and an emerging magnet for technology investment, partly due to its relatively low cost of land, available industrial space, and a state government actively courting tech and manufacturing companies. For Manna, these factors combine with a favourable regulatory environment at the federal level — the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been progressively developing frameworks for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone operations, which are essential for scalable commercial drone delivery.
Kenny Jacobs, Manna's newly appointed executive chair, spoke candidly at the launch of the company's first full-scale US operation, telling Reuters: "This part of the US — Oklahoma, Texas, states around here — will really be the battleground for scaling up and proving all types of drone delivery globally. The technology is proven. Now it's about the commercial scalability and showing how quickly you can open up bases and deliver all types of things."
"The United States has the market that everybody wants. Consumer behaviour, the size of the market, and the fact that the aggregators have consolidated the market so well — it's just the right environment to scale."
— Bobby Healy, Founder and CEO, MannaJacobs projected that Manna would operate from 40 bases across Tulsa by mid-2027. Each local drone launch site, he noted, is no bigger than the area of four car parking spaces — a detail that speaks directly to the capital efficiency argument Manna is making to investors. Low capital expenditure per base, combined with rapid deployment speed, is central to the company's pitch that drone delivery can be commercially scalable, not just technically viable.
On the commercial partnerships front, Reuters reported that Manna is set to partner with major food delivery aggregators including DoorDash, McDonald's, and Uber Eats within the next two months for food deliveries in the southwest US. These partnerships are strategically significant: DoorDash and Uber Eats have combined market reach across tens of millions of US consumers, and integrating drone delivery into their existing logistics rails dramatically reduces Manna's need to build its own consumer-facing demand from scratch.
The European Regulatory Gap That's Pushing Drone Innovation Offshore
For policy professionals and European tech watchers, Manna's departure from active Irish operations is a cautionary signal. Ireland, like many EU member states, has been navigating the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) drone regulatory framework — a tiered system categorising drones into "Open," "Specific," and "Certified" categories based on risk level. While EASA has made significant strides since introducing its U-space regulatory framework for urban air mobility, implementation at the national level across member states has been inconsistent and, in many cases, slow.
The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has been working to align with EASA's standards, but Manna's public statements suggest that the specific planning and operational authorisations needed for commercial drone delivery at scale — particularly in residential areas — have not materialised with sufficient speed or clarity. This is not a uniquely Irish problem. Across Europe, drone startups have repeatedly cited regulatory uncertainty as a primary barrier to scaling operations, even when the underlying technology is mature and proven.
The irony is not lost on observers of European digital sovereignty debates. Europe has positioned itself as a global leader in tech regulation — from GDPR to the AI Act to the Digital Markets Act — yet this very emphasis on regulatory thoroughness can, in practice, slow the deployment of emerging technologies. The EU's strength in setting rules has not always translated into agility in enabling innovation within those rules. Manna's case is a live example of this tension, and it echoes dynamics seen in sectors from cloud infrastructure to AI tools, where European companies sometimes find it operationally easier to scale in the US or UK first.
Research from the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility has highlighted that regulatory fragmentation remains one of the top three barriers to commercial drone delivery adoption globally, alongside consumer trust and infrastructure readiness. Europe's patchwork of national implementations on top of EASA frameworks places it at a structural disadvantage compared to jurisdictions with more centralised aviation authority, like the US FAA or the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
Manna's Growth Trajectory: Key Numbers and Milestones
| Market / Region | Operational Status | Regulatory Position | Priority Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States (Tulsa, OK) | Active / Scaling | Operational authorisation secured | 🟢 Primary focus |
| United Kingdom | Active | Operational authorisation secured | 🟢 Active expansion |
| United Arab Emirates | Pending | Full authorisation anticipated | 🟡 In progress |
| Ireland | Strategic pause | Unclear national framework | 🔴 On hold |
Drone Delivery and Data Sovereignty: The Privacy Questions No One Is Asking Loudly Enough
For privacy professionals and IT decision-makers in Manna's audience, there is a dimension to the drone delivery story that rarely makes the business press but deserves serious attention: the data implications of autonomous drone fleets operating at scale in urban environments.
Commercial drones collecting delivery data generate significant information trails — GPS routes, customer location data, delivery time patterns, potentially video or sensor data captured during flight. As Manna scales to 40 bases in Tulsa alone, and then to six or more additional US cities, the volume and sensitivity of this data grows substantially. Questions around where that data is stored, how long it is retained, who has access to it, and what happens when US federal agencies request access under frameworks like the CLOUD Act become directly relevant — particularly for any European customers or partner organisations involved in cross-border operations.
This is familiar terrain for anyone who has navigated GDPR compliance in cloud infrastructure decisions. The same sovereignty questions that drove European enterprises to evaluate EU-based cloud providers over US hyperscalers now apply, in principle, to drone logistics operators. A startup like Manna, incorporated in Ireland and now scaling heavily in the US, will need to navigate dual regulatory obligations — EU data protection rules applying to its Dublin-based operations and staff data, and US federal aviation and data rules applying to its American operations.
According to analysis by the Wired reporting on drone regulation and privacy, the FAA's current drone regulatory framework focuses primarily on aviation safety rather than data privacy — leaving a significant gap that neither federal nor state law has consistently filled. This is notably different from the EU's approach, where GDPR creates baseline privacy obligations that would apply to drone operators collecting personal data. For policy professionals watching the transatlantic regulatory divergence in AI and data governance, drone delivery is another chapter in the same story.
