00:20:32 · Bobby Healy, Adrian Weckler
[00:20:32] S1: Well, need a billion, not 50,000,000. [00:20:36] S2: We're here in Little Ireland. That's still Yeah. Yeah. To be a major funding round. So $50,000,000 from ARK Invest, Cathie Wood, celebrity investor [00:20:43] S1: Yeah. [00:20:43] S2: Tesla, OpenAI, many others. And then shortly after that, you announced a pause on operations, on flying operations here in Ireland, and also a move to The US Yeah. Both from a business development point of view and yourself personally. You moved to Tulsa in Oklahoma. I just wanna focus on that American bit first. Can you describe to me what Tulsa has in terms of, you know, two week permitting and and and the environment there Yeah. Compared to, say, Dublin?
00:20:43 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:20:43] S2: Tesla, OpenAI, many others. And then shortly after that, you announced a pause on operations, on flying operations here in Ireland, and also a move to The US Yeah. Both from a business development point of view and yourself personally. You moved to Tulsa in Oklahoma. I just wanna focus on that American bit first. Can you describe to me what Tulsa has in terms of, you know, two week permitting and and and the environment there Yeah. Compared to, say, Dublin? [00:21:16] S1: Yeah. Yeah. It's very important to understand first what Manna is. Up to now, it's been an R and D business that operates up to now in Ireland. So, you know, I love that The Irish Times announced that we racked up 50,000,000 in losses, clearly understand how venture works, right? So, we've been investing and building a platform, right? So, if you think about it that way up to where we are now, then it became time to start, right? We had a great aviation license in Europe and The EU, allowed us to fly beyond visual line of sight, pretty much unrestricted. We could fly anywhere, even centre Dublin if we wanted to. Then we just you saw, mean, it's well documented, we just couldn't get plan and permission anywhere. And unfortunately, no one's I can't blame anyone, you know, it's just we don't have planning regulations in any way that understand the concept of use space. I'm sure you've heard of use space, the drone regulations. Yeah. [00:22:18] S2: And look, you've always adopted the green jersey. You always... Whenever you get a chance, you usually talk up Ireland. I do. It's a place
00:22:18 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:22:18] S2: And look, you've always adopted the green jersey. You always... Whenever you get a chance, you usually talk up Ireland. I do. It's a place [00:22:26] S1: to do business, the [00:22:27] S2: government, the IDA, all of those things. Also the regulator here. [00:22:31] S1: Yep. [00:22:32] S2: And Ireland as an aviation hub. Yeah. Yeah. And yet, when it comes down to it, when it comes down to it, there's one part of that system at least where you kind of felt you couldn't continue the business there, that you had to leave. [00:22:50] S1: Would say it did huge damage to our business. Like, we were two years unable to open up new bases. Like, in Glasnevin, where we had like, what, 150 people working? We couldn't even open a base in our own HQ. To no particular anybody's fault. We went too fast for Ireland. Like, I don't blame Ireland here. We went so fast, no one saw it coming, like, space is what we needed, right, to give the planners what they need to permit stuff, and we we have no use space in Ireland. The IEA, ERNAV, Ireland, you know, they've no budget to do use space.
00:22:50 · Bobby Healy, Adrian Weckler
[00:22:50] S1: Would say it did huge damage to our business. Like, we were two years unable to open up new bases. Like, in Glasnevin, where we had like, what, 150 people working? We couldn't even open a base in our own HQ. To no particular anybody's fault. We went too fast for Ireland. Like, I don't blame Ireland here. We went so fast, no one saw it coming, like, space is what we needed, right, to give the planners what they need to permit stuff, and we we have no use space in Ireland. The IEA, ERNAV, Ireland, you know, they've no budget to do use space. [00:23:29] S2: But I remember last August when the government came out with its framework document, it was supposed to address lot of these issues. In other words, the expectation was things are disjointed, they're a little bit of a mess. We're still in the early stages, but we are a forward thinking country and we're going to provide clarity. It's called the framework document. And it addressed use space really in name only. I remember reading it thinking they've just pushed it back to the local planners. They've just pushed most of the key stuff. Yeah. Stuff about noise. Stuff like numbers. Number of flights. [00:24:03] S1: Yeah. [00:24:04] S2: Back to the local planners and dressed up in, you know, words like innovation and the future and, you know, pro business. So my point here though is, you know, I'm wondering if you've lost any heart in Ireland because we have a pro business government, we've pro business this, that, and the other. I've heard you say, but at the end of the day, you can't get stuck.
00:24:30 · Bobby Healy
[00:24:30] S1: Look. It's... Wearing my green jersey as an Irish person, not as Bobby running Manna. It's it's a stupid situation where we didn't figure out as a country to get behind this technology and keep winning, we but haven't lost. And to be clear, man has grown like crazy in Ireland. Like, we've got three aircraft that we're designing. One, Mark two just got its approval from the FCC in The United States, so that starts flying in January. Mark III is under development, nearly there, and Mark IV comes behind it. We're hiring engineers in Ireland, still growing, high quality jobs in Ireland to build. So Ireland hasn't lost anything. The only thing it's slightly embarrassing for my company and Ireland that we can't grow in our own country, but doesn't I mean, Ireland's a tiny market anyway for this business. We've always been United States, United States, United States. And if we weren't in The United States, we'd be worth a hundredth of what we would be worth if we were, you know, so and Europe isn't even EU isn't even an interesting opportunity for us, it's The United States. So we've always said, when we're ready to scale, we're going to raise growth rounds, and hopefully in the billions, not in the tens of millions, it's The United States we want to be a leader in. I don't want to be the winner in Europe, I want to be the winner in The United States. I want to beat Google, beat Amazon, beat ZipLine,
00:25:52 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:25:52] S2: And so... So you've you've moved Tulsa in Oklahoma. Now you've gone from having arguments over m 50 car parks to a city in Tulsa. And just describe to me what the environment's like there in terms of a drone company. [00:26:08] S1: Well, like, we're backed by, politically, the governor of Oklahoma, the lieutenant governor, the mayor of Tulsa. We've had two senators visit us in Dublin and load our aircraft, US senators, one from Michigan, one from Oklahoma. We've had the governor of Oklahoma come here. We've had no end of political support in The United States because jobs matter. And Trump, the White House, issued an executive order about a year and a half ago called Unleashing American Drone Dominance, right? A bit of does what it says on a tin, but it was intent on saying, right, America has lost twenty years to the Chinese on manufacturing, supply chain, everything from motors to batteries to PCBs to carbon, you name it. [00:26:57] S2: Not wrong about that.