Manna Aero, the Irish autonomous drone delivery startup, is setting up a US operations and manufacturing center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that will employ about 1,000 people over the next several years. Construction is already underway, and CEO Bobby Healy told TechCrunch he expects manufacturing to start at the site in roughly a year. The company was running test flights at the Tulsa location as recently as the Tuesday before the announcement, according to News on 6.

The primary Tulsa site sits at the intersection of 15th Street and Utica Avenue, per News on 6. Manna's own site currently advertises delivery "coming soon to Tulsa, Oklahoma," and Healy first floated the US expansion publicly at the XPONENTIAL 2026 conference, as reported by DroneXL and Autonomy Global in May and June.

The buildout follows a $50 million venture round Manna closed in April 2026, and the company has brought on former Ryanair CMO Kenny Jacobs as executive chair and president specifically to drive the US push, Healy told TechCrunch. Manna plans to grow its US operations headcount to somewhere between 200 and 300 people over the next twelve months, separate from the Tulsa manufacturing jobs, and is evaluating six additional US cities for entry by the end of 2027.

Manna's operating model is unchanged from what it has run in Europe: automated, remotely monitored drones that lower packages to the ground on a tether rather than landing, the same delivery mechanism used by Alphabet's Wing and by Zipline. The company runs a hybrid commercial structure — delivery-as-a-service billed per flight, plus partnerships with DoorDash, Deliveroo and Uber Eats in Europe, alongside direct business accounts and its own consumer app.

Healy's stated ambition, as relayed to TechCrunch, is for Manna to become a major US drone delivery operator on par with Zipline, Amazon and Wing, the three incumbents that have so far dominated commercial drone logistics stateside. He attributed part of the timing to federal policy, telling TechCrunch that Trump administration and FAA moves have given the drone delivery sector a "turbo boost" in the US — a characterization from the company, not an independent regulatory assessment.

Manna is not new to American airspace. The company began US operations in 2023 at the AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone, a Hillwood-developed planned community near Dallas, and has since expanded across the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area, where it intends to keep scaling over the coming year. Manna has also taken part in a joint demonstration with Wing, ANRA and the Arlington Police Department showing overlapping drone operations sharing the same airspace, according to material on Manna's newsroom page. Earlier in its US run, the company publicized a Halloween-themed delivery stunt via PRNewswire, billed as the first "trick or treat" delivered by drone.

The Tulsa investment arrives roughly a month after Manna scaled back its drone delivery operations in Ireland, citing an absence of planning regulations that would let it expand at home, per TechCrunch's reporting. The company says it will keep its headquarters, R&D, and administrative functions in Ireland, with manufacturing now split between Dublin and the new Oklahoma plant.

The regulatory contrast is the more interesting story here. A company built and proven in a jurisdiction with comparatively permissive drone rules is now redirecting its manufacturing capacity toward a market it credits with faster-moving federal air-traffic policy, while pulling back at home over the opposite problem. That inversion — Ireland as the R&D cradle, the US as the scale market — is not the pattern most of the industry expected five years ago, when European regulatory frameworks for BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) operations were generally considered ahead of the FAA's.

Whether Tulsa becomes a genuine manufacturing hub or primarily a fulfillment and assembly outpost will depend on how fast Manna's flight volumes actually grow once the plant is running, which by Healy's own timeline is still about a year out. Drone delivery has cycled through several rounds of ambitious city-by-city expansion plans before — from various operators — that outpaced actual daily flight counts. The six additional cities Manna is evaluating for 2027 entry, and whether local permitting keeps pace with the company's timeline, will be the more concrete test of whether this expansion matches its stated scale.