ARK Invest is betting on underdog drone delivery company Manna to beat out Alphabet and Zipline

Bobby Healy is at peace with his drone delivery enterprise being unsexy. “Think of us like a low-cost airline,” the Manna CEO told Fortune. That pitch just landed him $50 million.

Manna, the Irish drone delivery startup, closed a Series B this month backed by ARK Invest—Cathie Wood’s firm, known for early investments in OpenAI, Tesla, and SpaceX—along with the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Schooner Capital, Coca Cola HBC, and Molten Ventures. The capital will be put towards expanding Manna’s U.S. and European operations. Total funding now sits at $110 million. 

Manna, founded in 2018, operates throughout Ireland, as well as Finland and Texas, delivering anything from burritos to biomedical tests. The company has already completed more than 250,000 successful deliveries. It recently announced a new partnership with Uber, and has existing contracts with DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Just Eat. 

The problem Manna hopes to solve isn’t ritzy, but the math and market are.

Road-based delivery in the U.S. costs merchants around $10 per order in driver costs alone. Manna does it for cents in electricity. Its drones fly at around 50 to 60 mph in a straight line, deliver in under three minutes, and turn around in under 60 seconds—eight deliveries per aircraft per hour versus the industry average of 1.2.

Meanwhile, the global rapid delivery economy—same-day and on-demand—is projected to grow 21.3% year-over-year for the next decade, reaching $100 billion by 2034, according to Manna. And the last-mile (from hub to final destination) delivery market was worth an estimated $166.45 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $311.31 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 9.62 percent.

Manna’s U.S. target is 92 million family homes that gig economy delivery has never served profitably. As Healy notes, there are more than a billion food delivery orders placed annually in the U.S., and not enough drivers to move them without bleeding money. “Drones don’t take jobs away,” Healy added. “You’re giving every small business in the suburbs a better logistics platform than Amazon has.” 

Recent regulatory unlock, according to Healy, is what’s making VCs move now. The........

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