The Drone Company Quietly Taking Over Delivery

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

Northwest Registered Agent - northwestregisteredagent.com/twist

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"

Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com

Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com

Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp

Follow Lon: