Drone Delivery Startup Manna Is Building a US Manufacturing Hub in Tulsa

Manna Aero, an Irish autonomous drone delivery company, is setting up a major operations and manufacturing center in Tulsa, Oklahoma that will eventually employ around 1,000 people. Construction has already started, and CEO Bobby Healy told TechCrunch he expects the facility to begin producing drones in roughly a year. The company was still running test flights at the Tulsa location as recently as the week before announcing the expansion, according to News on 6.

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

The expansion follows a $50 million venture funding round Manna closed in April 2026. The company also brought on Kenny Jacobs, former chief marketing officer of Ryanair, as executive chair and president to lead the US strategy, Healy told TechCrunch. Manna plans to hire between 200 and 300 people for US operations over the next year—separate from the manufacturing jobs in Tulsa—and is evaluating six additional US cities for launch by the end of 2027.

How Manna's Drones Work

Manna operates the same delivery method it uses in Europe: remotely piloted drones that lower packages to the ground on a tether instead of landing. This is the same approach used by Alphabet's Wing and by Zipline, another major drone delivery operator. The company combines multiple revenue streams: it charges per flight for delivery-as-a-service, partners with food delivery services like DoorDash and Deliveroo in Europe, and runs direct business accounts plus a consumer app.

Competing in a Growing Market

Healy's goal is for Manna to become a major US drone delivery player alongside Zipline, Amazon, and Wing—the three companies that have dominated commercial drone logistics in the country so far. He credited part of the timing to federal policy, telling TechCrunch that Trump administration actions and FAA decisions have given the drone delivery sector momentum in the US. (This is the company's own assessment, not an independent regulatory finding.)

Manna is not new to the US. The company started operations in 2023 at the AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone near Dallas and has since expanded across the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where it plans to keep growing over the next year. The company has also taken part in a joint demonstration with Wing, ANRA, and the Arlington Police Department showing how multiple drones can share the same airspace safely, according to Manna's newsroom. Earlier, Manna publicized a Halloween-themed delivery as a publicity stunt, billed as the first "trick or treat" delivered by drone, per PRNewswire.

The Regulatory Shift

The Tulsa investment comes about a month after Manna scaled back its drone delivery operations in Ireland. The reason, according to TechCrunch, was the lack of planning rules that would allow the company to grow at home. Manna says it will keep its headquarters, research and development, and administrative work in Ireland, with manufacturing now split between Dublin and Oklahoma.

The regulatory story deserves attention. A company that was built and tested in a country with fairly open drone rules is now shifting its manufacturing toward a market it sees as moving faster on federal air-traffic policy, while retreating from its home base due to the opposite problem. Five years ago, this would have seemed backward; European regulators were generally considered ahead of the FAA in allowing drones to fly beyond a pilot's line of sight, a capability known as BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight). That expectation has now flipped.

Whether Tulsa becomes a real manufacturing powerhouse or primarily a fulfillment and assembly site will depend on how quickly Manna's actual delivery volumes grow once the plant is running. By Healy's timeline, that is still about a year away. Drone delivery companies have announced city-by-city expansion plans before that never quite matched the promised flight counts. The real test will be whether Manna can enter six new cities by the end of 2027 as planned, and whether local permitting keeps pace with the company's ambitions.