In the summer of 2018, Bobby Healy was sitting in his garden in a Dublin suburb enjoying a glass of wine, when he decided he wanted nothing more than a bag of fries to go along with his drink. But there was a problem.
“It was impossible to get a delivery here on the weekend, or if the weather’s bad,” he said. “There’s just not enough drivers to work for delivery companies, so you could be waiting an hour for your bag of chips.”
Rather than just settling for a piece of toast, Healy did what any self-respecting serial entrepreneur would do, and set about founding Manna Air Delivery, a drone delivery company that has completed more than 250,000 jobs to date.
As of July 2026, Manna is delivering everything from takeout food to medicine and defibrillators, as it takes on the $180 billion last-mile logistics market, aiming to make deliveries faster, greener and more affordable.
But turning flying delivery robots into reality means fitting powerful AI systems onto small aircraft while meeting stringent safety and regulatory requirements. There are also societal barriers to overcome, as some fear a future of skies crowded with noisy, privacy-invading drones, raising questions of whether more technology in the world is always a good thing.
‘We have to optimize the hell out of the stack’
Healy described how the drone delivery sector has walked a long road to proving that the idea is viable, both to regulators and the companies that use these services, and that the US market has been the fastest to adopt the technology.
“The top companies: ourselves, Google Wing, Amazon Prime Air and Zipline, we're all now regulated and ready to grow,” he said. “We’re live in about 40 locations this year in Oklahoma and Texas, and our friends at Google and Amazon are the same, so collectively there'll be about 10 million deliveries this year, nearly all in the USA.”
Manna’s drones are supervised by human operators on the ground, but use autonomous obstacle detection to fly safely. Healy said the system relies on streams from multiple sensors, processed by a mix of computer vision and more deterministic AI systems, all running on onboard compute.
An engineer works on a Manna drone. Credit: Manna Air Delivery
“There would never be a scenario where you would have anything safety related needing to go off the aircraft and rely on a network, because networks can never be reliable,” he said. “The compute has to be on the edge, which is a difficult challenge because of the energy it consumes. We have to be sacred with our battery and energy, and also weight on the aircraft.”
Healy said that Manna has achieved this by relentlessly fine-tuning both the software and hardware on its drones to deliver maximum compute with minimal weight and energy use: “We have to optimize the hell out of the stack.”
When a pizza becomes a wing
Other drone delivery companies are solving more item-specific challenges. Flytrex, founded in Tel Aviv in 2013, focuses solely on food delivery. One of its early partnerships with Little Caesars in Dallas created an engineering problem: the drag of a large flying pizza.
“Delivering large pizzas has been a big challenge for us, because now you're flying with this huge sail,” said Amit Regev, co-founder and CEO at Flytrex.
The company has tackled this by developing a system that holds the pizza at a consistent angle to minimize drag while in the air.
“It’s designed to keep the pizzas at about five degrees. When you’re flying forward, you’re actually getting almost a wing shape, so rather than having a sail, you’re almost generating lift,” said Regev. “With that design, when you do endurance testing, you can actually fly even further with the pizza than without it.”
A Flytrex drone carrying a 16-inch pizza. Credit: Flytrex
Flytrex is also delivering sandwiches for New Jersey-founded chain Jersey Mike’s and signed a partnership with Uber Eats in September 2025. Regev said the sector has now moved from proof of concept and regulatory approval to making the unit economics work at scale.
“How do you get drones, which are sophisticated devices with a lot of technology, to deliver burritos at $5 and actually have enough margin to be profitable and run a healthy business? My personal opinion, just by looking at the competition, is that nobody’s solved the economics yet. I think we’re getting very close,” he said.
Regev said a big part of bringing costs per delivery down involves using AI to improve the management of Flytrex’s fleets.
“Optimizing drone routes is not as easy,” he said. “We have a huge team that deals just with how to get the most efficient route.”
Concerned communities
Beyond optimizing fleets and onboard compute capacity, drone delivery companies have another challenge on their hands: winning over communities who are suspicious of the technology. In June 2026, Texas residents protested outside Amazon’s drone facility, to voice concerns over noise, safety and privacy, following demonstrations in Georgia and Australia.
Healy believes some people’s concerns over noise pollution are based on a negative perception around smaller drones, which make a higher-frequency sound than Manna’s vehicles.
“The typical drones that most people are used to naturally generate really angry, buzzy bee frequencies that we don’t. We're much bigger aircraft, so much lower frequency noise,” he told The Infinite Loop.
Addressing privacy concerns, Healy said that onboard computing means that no data from Manna drones’ sensors ever reaches a cloud server, adding that safety conversations around delivery need to take the status quo into account.
“To make money, delivery drivers have to go fast. Delivery drivers are six times more likely to be involved in a collision than a normal driver,” Healy claimed.
Healy and Regev both believe that drone delivery will lead to a more convenient, greener and safer society, with fewer vehicles on the roads. The key question will be whether companies like Manna and Flytrex can make the unit economics of cutting-edge technology work for the low-margin business of last-mile delivery.
Top photo: A Manna Air Delivery drone in action. Credit: Manna Air Delivery
