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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:
Bobby Healy of Manna joins TWiST
How a Manna base works: drones migrate around the city like Waymos
Battle-hardened in Irish weather: 97% uptime in wind and rain
Margin-positive economics & the path to $0.20 per delivery
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$50M Series B vs competitors raising $600–800M
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.
The peer-to-peer drone future and hyper-local commerce
Growing from 170 to 570 people and moving manufacturing to Oklahoma
Ian Laffey of Theseus joins TWIST
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.
Inside Ukraine's drone industry: front-line iteration and free-market speed
How GPS gets jammed across the spectrum
Theseus's approach: cameras + satellite maps + ML
The product: Raspberry Pi, SD card, camera — pretending to be GPS
Ukraine: 6–8M drones a year. The US: 300K over two years.
Are US drone primes actually reconstituting the supply chain?
Y Combinator as a defense tech accelerator
"Pick an issue and start working as hard as you can towards it"
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