The Drone Company Quietly Taking Over Delivery
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.2 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Today’s show:
The "Ryanair of drone delivery" just raised $50 million and plans to bring its technology from Europe to the United States. Manna founder Bobby Healy explains to TWiST how his Dublin-based company completed 300,000 deliveries while some rivals are still publishing blog posts, and why low-cost airline economics will decide who wins the autonomous skies.
Sticking to the drone theme, TWiST welcomed Theseus co-founder Ian Laffey, who called in from Kyiv to tell us about his company’s drone guidance system. It runs off a simple camera and Google Maps. The technology could rewrite the modern, GPS-jammed battlefield, and bring more firepower to smaller nations fending off larger foes.
Guest Links:
Manna https://www.manna.aero
Bobby Healy https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhealy/
Manna funding announcement https://www.manna.aero/blog/series-b
Theseus https://www.theseus.us/
Ian Laffey https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilaffey2/
Most recent Theseus funding announcement https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/17/defense-tech-theseus-landed-y-combinator-the-us-special-forces-and-4-3m-from-a-tweet/
The tweet that kickstarted Theseus: https://x.com/ilaffey2/status/1759353732075294766
Timestamps:
0:00 Bobby Healy of Manna joins TWiST
1:41 How a Manna base works: drones migrate around the city like Waymos
7:18 Battle-hardened in Irish weather: 97% uptime in wind and rain
8:52 Margin-positive economics & the path to $0.20 per delivery
9:25 Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist
12:32 $50M Series B vs competitors raising $600–800M
19:51 Deel - Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit https://deel.com/twist to learn more.
22:53 The peer-to-peer drone future and hyper-local commerce
25:46 Growing from 170 to 570 people and moving manufacturing to Oklahoma
28:43 Ian Laffey of Theseus joins TWIST
29:57 Render: Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers.
30:58 Inside Ukraine's drone industry: front-line iteration and free-market speed
33:55 How GPS gets jammed across the spectrum
35:10 Theseus's approach: cameras + satellite maps + ML
37:04 The product: Raspberry Pi, SD card, camera — pretending to be GPS
49:02 Ukraine: 6–8M drones a year. The US: 300K over two years.
51:17 Are US drone primes actually reconstituting the supply chain?
58:22 Y Combinator as a defense tech accelerator
59:40 "Pick an issue and start working as hard as you can towards it"
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex and when I was but a humble young boy, I read a book called the Bible. |
| 0:06.2 | And one thing that I talked about was manna coming down from heaven. |
| 0:09.9 | Well, as it turns out, there's a company out there in the world of startups that is using that name because they are also bringing down goods from the sky. |
| 0:17.1 | Called manna, it's a drone delivery company based originally out of Ireland that is growing quickly, raising a lot of money, and proving that the future really is not evenly distributed. I didn't know enough about this company, so I'm really glad to bring it to you. So please join me and welcoming to the show. It's Bobby Healy. Bobby, how you doing? |
| 0:33.2 | It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. |
| 0:35.8 | This week in startups is brought to you by Render. |
| 0:38.8 | Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform Render. |
| 0:44.0 | Go to render.com slash twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500 to $100,000 in free credits depending on your stage and backers. |
| 0:56.8 | Deal. Founders scale faster on deal deal set up payroll for any country in minutes hire anyone anywhere get visas handled fast and get back to |
| 1:03.0 | building visit deal dot com slash twist to learn more and northwest registered agent get more when you start |
| 1:10.2 | your business with Northwest. |
| 1:12.4 | In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. |
| 1:18.0 | Learn more at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist. |
| 1:22.2 | I had to kind of confess because I know zip line here in the States. |
| 1:26.5 | I've paid a little bit of attention to the, you know, every three year Amazon post about how they've solved drone-based deliveries. |
| 1:32.8 | And to me, it's always felt slightly out of reach, but learning about your company, hot damn. |
| 1:38.3 | You guys are doing enormous volumes across two different continents. |
| 1:41.6 | So, first of all, how did I become so far behind on MENA |
| 1:45.5 | and it's drone delivery of success? |
| 1:46.8 | I'm almost embarrassed. |
| 1:48.6 | Well, so because we started in Europe, |
| 1:51.6 | so we're kind of the Ryanair of this industry, we think. |
... |
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