Bobby Healy decided to move the U.S. portion of his manufacturing, his leadership team and his family to a new city. And he picked Tulsa, Oklahoma. The founder and CEO of Manna Air Delivery made the announcement at XPONENTIAL 2026 during a fireside chat with Jennifer Hankins, Managing Director of Tulsa Innovation Labs. The two cut straight to the mechanics of why location in the U.S. is now one of the most consequential decisions a scaling autonomy company can make for those desiring to work here. They also discussed why Tulsa came out on top for Manna, as they looked to expand the development of the company’s U.S. manufacturing capability, additive to its Irish operations.
Eight Years to This Moment
Manna has been around the block, so to speak. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, the company has spent eight years building and flying BVLOS drone delivery operations for five of those years in Ireland and nearly three in Texas and Finland. It has raised just over $100 million in venture capital, including a recent $50 million Series B round. It already operates with positive unit economics. Every flight Manna flies, Healy said, turns a profit, an unusual distinction in a sector more accustomed to burning capital than earning it.
That track record is what made the Tulsa announcement significant. Manna is relocating part of its U.S. operation, manufacturing, leadership and commercial base, to Oklahoma. “We’re all in on USA,” Healy said. “We’re no longer interested in anywhere else.”
After the show, Healy explained that by those comments he meant the U.S. is naturally the company’s largest long-term commercial opportunity given the scale of suburban delivery markets, aviation infrastructure and the pace at which commercial drone delivery is developing here. As part of scaling operations in the U.S., establishing in-market manufacturing capability was necessary and reflects the maturity and size of the opportunities. Manna is also progressing through the FAA Part 135 certification process as part of its continued U.S. expansion.
Healy emphasized, at the same time, Ireland remains central to the business. The company recently announced plans to create more than 300 additional roles across engineering, operations and support functions based in Ireland. U.S. jobs and manufacturing expansion are additional to Irish jobs and operations, not coming at their expense.
Regulatory Clarity Unlocked the Market
For years, drone delivery in the United States was commercially viable in theory and operationally gridlocked in practice. Healy directly attributed this to regulatory uncertainty which kept capital on the sidelines and companies in perpetual pilot mode. “It was always inevitable,” he said. “It was about regulatory timing.”
The Executive Order on drone dominance, followed by the FAA’s BVLOS rulemaking and the emerging Part 108 framework have removed that uncertainty, at least for Healy. Manna, Wing, Amazon and Zipline have all leaned in on drone delivery in the U.S. simultaneously, not because the technology changed, but because the policy environment finally gave investors a credible path to returns. “I actually don’t see anything now preventing the industry from going full throttle up,” Healy said. “I really don’t.”
Why Tulsa Is the Goldilocks City for Autonomy
Healy coined the phrase “Goldilocks city” to describe what Tulsa offered that other markets couldn’t match in combination: the right urban density to make delivery economics work, an established aerospace sector, a governor and mayor actively supporting the industry, cleared airspace through a safety partnership already in place and an innovation ecosystem through Tulsa Innovation Labs that handles the complex, friction-heavy work of standing up a new operation in a new market.
Speaking directly to Hankins, Healy said, “Every strand of a very complex city rollout, there’s someone in your team kicking that door open.” He continued, “I put in a call…and I have a list of houses ready to move my family into. The mayor is engaged. The airspace work is done. It’s all in a folder.” For a 200-person company without the bandwidth to simultaneously build in multiple markets, that kind of end-to-end operational readiness makes all the difference between a viable expansion and a resource-draining one.
Hankins framed Tulsa’s strategy as intentional economic development. “Our passion is not waiting for opportunity but actually building the conditions for it wholesale,” she said. Tulsa Innovation Labs built the infrastructure of enablement (think: workforce pipelines, government relationships, airspace partnerships, commercial real estate) before the companies arrived, so that companies like Manna could move from decision to operations without losing months to coordination overhead.
A Logistics Business, Not a SpaceX Story
Manna sees a future in the U.S. It runs its operation the way Ryanair runs an airline: relentless focus on unit cost, fast aircraft turnaround, and margin discipline at every step. Each aircraft completes eight deliveries per hour. Healy described the business model in unglamorous terms that most tech founders would avoid.
“This is not a SpaceX,” he said flatly. “We’re not catching rockets. We’re not solving some problem that’s never been solved before. We’re doing things that are well understood already, integrating into a legacy industry of airspace and making money.”
The primary product Manna delivers is hot coffee, not because the company thinks that’s the highest use of drone logistics, but because it’s what customers order first and most often. Manne anticipates food delivery partnerships with DoorDash and Uber Eats will to drive the bulk of its U.S. rollout.
That discipline extends to how Healy thinks about the market opportunity. There are approximately four billion food delivery orders placed annually through major U.S. platforms. Capturing even a meaningful fraction of that will require a decade of infrastructure buildout. “It’s going to be a game of capital,” he said, “and a game of providing infrastructure in cities as fast as possible.” Tulsa has already invested in that infrastructure.
Jobs, Small Business and the Local Multiplier
The value proposition in Manna’s move to Tulsa is a two-way street. Manna’s model won’t just employ drone operators and technicians. It will also power the small businesses that fulfill the orders. In Ireland, a single popsicle vendor selling homemade products through Manna’s platform now moves tens of thousands of units. The same dynamic, at suburban scale across Tulsa, and other American cities, could reshape how local retail operates and who benefits from it.
Healy projects 2,000 to 3,000 jobs in Tulsa alone over the next several years. They will span manufacturing, operations and the broader commercial ecosystem Manna will anchor. That number, he told the Tulsa mayor directly, is the prize, and it comes with a condition. “I’m not going to make that decision unless I know they have my back,” he said. “That the state, that the city are in it together. Because I’m going to be creating manufacturing jobs. We’re basing our entire U.S. operation there. So it’s not that we have our hand out. We’re in this together.”
The mayor’s response was characteristically local. He requested that Manna’s first delivery in Tulsa land in his mother’s backyard. Healy agreed.