Six weeks ago, in a press release issued through the Irish government’s Enterprise Ireland agency, Manna Air Delivery CEO Bobby Healy called Ireland “the foundation of everything we do” and committed to designing and building drones in Dublin. On Tuesday afternoon at XPONENTIAL Detroit, the same CEO told the audience he is moving Manna’s manufacturing to Tulsa, Oklahoma, relocating his leadership team next week, and is targeting 2,000 to 3,000 jobs in the city over the next few years.

Bobby Healy, founder and CEO of Dublin-based Manna Air Delivery, spoke in a fireside conversation moderated by Jennifer Hankins, Managing Director of Tulsa Innovation Labs, the George Kaiser Family Foundation initiative that led the consortium behind the $51 million federal Tech Hub grant Tulsa received in 2024 for autonomy and uncrewed systems development.

Healy’s framing on stage was unambiguous. “We’re no longer interested in anywhere else except the USA,” he said. “We’re moving our manufacturing there. My leadership team and myself are moving there. We’re heading down next week.”

The announcement is a significant escalation beyond Manna’s April 1 Series B announcement, which raised $50 million from ARK Invest, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), Schooner Capital, and existing investors Coca-Cola HBC, Molten Ventures, and Enterprise Ireland.

Dublin Drone Drones Manna — Photo credit: Manna Air Delivery

From “Ireland Is The Foundation” To Tulsa Manufacturing In Six Weeks

The contrast with Manna’s April messaging is sharp. On April 1, 2026, the company issued a release through Enterprise Ireland announcing 400 new jobs across Ireland and the US.

In that release, Healy said: “Ireland is the foundation of everything we do. We design and build our drones here, develop our software here, and have spent seven years refining our operations in communities across the country.”

The release described Manna’s “end-to-end Irish-built technology stack, from airframe design and manufacturing through to flight orchestration software.”

Manna’s LinkedIn feed in early April carried the same emphasis: “Manna is an Irish company. Built here, scaling globally.” The company posted a photo of a meeting with the Taoiseach. Enterprise Ireland’s release was welcomed by Peter Burke, Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment, who called Manna’s expansion “a powerful endorsement of Ireland’s standing as a global centre for innovation and advanced manufacturing.”

Six weeks later in Detroit, the framing changed. Healy on stage described Tulsa as a place where Manna will hire “all the manufacturing technicians we need” and characterized the US pivot as a complete shift. “We’re done hesitantly next week,” he told Hankins, referring to his personal relocation. The moderator did not ask Healy to reconcile his Tulsa manufacturing announcement with the April messaging, and Manna had not issued a separate press release confirming the Tulsa manufacturing decision at the time of publication.

For context, Manna already operates in the United States. The company has been flying in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for nearly three years and launched commercial service in Tulsa on April 1, 2026. What Healy announced at XPONENTIAL is a step beyond US operations: the relocation of corporate leadership and manufacturing from Dublin to Tulsa.

A 2,000 To 3,000 Job Target, Far Bigger Than April’s Plan

The headcount target Healy offered onstage also marks an escalation. The April press release described 400 new roles globally, bringing Manna from 170 to 570 employees across Ireland and US operations. At XPONENTIAL, Healy described the Tulsa opportunity in much larger terms.

Healy described the Tulsa opportunity as 2,000 to 3,000 jobs over the next few years, “conservatively.”

“It’s a big prize for everybody,” he said. He emphasized that the decision required state and city partnership: “I’m not going to make that decision unless I know they have my back, that the states, that the city have my back, and we’re in it together.”

The Tulsa commitment, Healy said, includes high-paid manufacturing jobs and Manna’s entire US operation.

The Tulsa choice draws on infrastructure that has been building for years. Tulsa Innovation Labs, founded in 2020 as an initiative of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, identified advanced air mobility as one of four “tech niche” focus areas. The consortium it leads, the Tulsa Hub for Equitable and Trustworthy Autonomy (THETA), received approximately $51 million in 2024 from the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Tech Hubs program, specifically to advance domestic manufacturing and deployment of UAS and other autonomous systems.

Healy called Tulsa “Goldilocks” for the combination of urban density, aerospace workforce heritage, and government alignment. He cited engagement from Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt’s office, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols, and Lieutenant Governor Matt Pinnell as a model of state and city alignment. The first Manna delivery in Tulsa, Healy told the audience, will go to Mayor Nichols’s mother’s backyard.

The Low-Cost Airline Model And A Sharp Competitive Claim

Healy spent significant stage time differentiating Manna’s business model from competitors. “This is not a space taxi,” he said, contrasting Manna with the eVTOL passenger aircraft sector that dominated other XPONENTIAL sessions.

“The way I run this business is the way Ryanair runs their business. The way Southwest used to run their business when they started. There’s a relentless focus on human costs and the ability to scale efficiently.”

Manna performs eight deliveries per hour per aircraft within a roughly 4.8 kilometer (3 mile) radius, using a hot-swap battery system housed inside the cargo bin to deliver 60-second turnarounds at landing pads located in strip mall parking lots. DroneXL covered the operational economics in detail in March 2025, when Healy first publicly disclosed the eight-deliveries-per-hour figure and the roughly $4 per delivery cost.

On stage in Detroit, Healy repeated his strongest competitive claim: that Manna is the only drone delivery operator that is currently profitable on every flight.

“Right now we’re probably the only company that will do that and make money while we’re doing it,” he said.

He framed competitors Wing, Amazon Prime Air, and Zipline as well-capitalized but not yet making per-flight margin. The claim is harder to independently verify for any private drone delivery operator, but Manna has repeated it consistently in interviews with Fortune, the Irish Examiner, and investor materials, and Healy made the same claim publicly at the Goldman Sachs Disruptive Technology Summit earlier this year.

Healy projects the cost-per-delivery falling to roughly $1 at scale, against McKinsey’s estimate of $9 to $11 for traditional five-mile ground delivery. He has previously told Fortune that Manna’s competitive field has thinned to four players: itself, Wing, Zipline, and Amazon Prime Air.

A Sharp Pivot On EU Versus US Regulation

Healy’s regulatory framing on stage marks another reversal worth noting. In a March 2025 DroneXL piece, Healy described the EU’s unified regulatory framework as putting US-based drone delivery operators at a “three-year minimum disadvantage” compared with Manna’s European operations. In a February 2026 Irish Examiner interview, he said the EU is “probably better” as a natural habitat for the company while criticizing US local political fragmentation.

At XPONENTIAL, the framing flipped. Healy credited Executive Order 14307, President Trump’s June 2025 “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” order, with creating regulatory certainty in the United States.

“Uncertainty is gone,” he said. “That’s going to bring in a lot of private capital and industry, which is going to allow companies like us to really go for it.” He described Europe’s regulations as “slightly fragmented” while characterizing the US path as “a clear regulatory path and certainty for scaling.”

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford visited Manna’s Dublin headquarters on January 30, 2026 to discuss transatlantic regulatory alignment, which DroneXL covered at the time. The Part 108 BVLOS NPRM, published in August 2025, is still working through its rulemaking process, with a final rule deadline of February 1, 2026 that the FAA missed. Healy’s stated confidence in US regulatory certainty rests heavily on the political signal from EO 14307 rather than on a finalized BVLOS rule.

DroneXL’s Take

I have been covering Manna since 2020, when Bobby Healy launched medication delivery flights to isolated residents during the early months of the COVID pandemic. The arc since then has been remarkably consistent on the technology and the business model, but the public framing on geography has shifted substantially in the last six weeks.

The April 1 Enterprise Ireland release was a coordinated Irish government and Manna communications exercise built on the framing that Ireland is Manna’s manufacturing home. ISIF, the sovereign investment fund that participated in the Series B, has a specific mandate to back companies that deliver “long-term economic impact for Ireland.” Six weeks later, the same CEO is announcing a manufacturing move to Oklahoma and a 2,000 to 3,000 job target that dwarfs the 400-job number in the April release. Ireland’s Minister for Enterprise has not commented publicly on the Tulsa decision as of this writing.

There is a defensible business case for the pivot. The US is structurally a bigger drone delivery market: more suburban housing, higher consumer spend on takeaway, a single FAA airspace authority rather than fragmented national regulators, and a federal executive order that has explicitly opened the door to scale. Tulsa specifically has an infrastructure-ready autonomy hub, a $51 million federal grant going into the sector, and a state and city government actively recruiting drone manufacturers. The case for Manna making this move is not the question.

The question worth watching is how the Irish side of the partnership reacts. ISIF is on the cap table specifically to support Irish economic activity. If Manna’s manufacturing center of gravity moves from Dublin to Tulsa, the political logic of further Irish state investment changes. The same goes for the Light UAS Operator Certificate Manna holds under EASA, which has been one of its competitive advantages in attracting capital. Whether Healy’s “no longer interested in anywhere else” framing is a stage line for a US audience or a structural commitment will become clear within months, when Manna either does or does not retain its Irish operational footprint at scale.

I would also note one thing the panel did not address. Manna’s Dublin operations have faced sustained community pushback over the past year, including a Fingal County Council planning enforcement action against the Blanchardstown hub and an organized resident group, Drone Action D15, mobilizing over noise concerns. DroneXL covered the Blanchardstown planning dispute in September 2025 and the broader Dublin community concerns in August. Tulsa is not Dublin. But Tulsa neighborhoods are also residential, and the noise and airspace questions that surfaced in Dublin will eventually surface in Oklahoma. Healy’s pitch to public sector partners on stage was that drone delivery creates local business jobs and accessibility for residents with limited mobility. Both claims are defensible. They are also the same claims he made in Dublin before the planning fight started.

Sources: Panel observed live at XPONENTIAL 2026, Huntington Place, Detroit, May 12, 2026. Manna Air Delivery Series B announcement via Business Wire and Enterprise Ireland, April 1, 2026. Tulsa Innovation Labs THETA Tech Hub grant announcement, July 2024. Fortune coverage of ARK Invest’s Series B participation, April 9, 2026. Irish Examiner interview with Bobby Healy, February 24, 2026.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.