 Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us over your lunch break. We're excited to be here, excited to be joined by Bobby And I must say before we kick off props to the slush team member that came up with the title for this for this particular talk I think before we start We're gonna show a really brief video to kind of introduce what we're what we're really talking about today When I watch the video like that, I feel like I'm really truly glimpsing into the future Bobby man is not your first business So maybe just talk us through how you came to this how you came to this business. How you came to drone delivery Yeah, I'm a programmer. That's my trade and I was curious about tech. I've this is the fourth business that I founded and This business came from very simple idea. I mean I live in a suburb of Dublin There's 25,000 people in the suburb and there's no profitable Delivery available from takeaway restaurants from anywhere and I'm sitting outside the local chip shop You know being Irish on a Friday night And there's two guys sitting in cars diesel powered cars with the engines running Waiting for an order to come in to drive out to deliver the order So pretty clear that the economics of delivery outside of very dense urban centers is broken Doesn't work. It needs a solution the restaurants need a solution the vendors need a solution and Producing co2 in cars with human beings is not the solution And then you combine that with a confluence of various different technologies around battery around GPU around machine vision LiDAR and all of these things now being available Almost in a commoditized form. You have the toolkit to actually build a solution It's one thing to think about you've got all these delivery guys. We've all seen them kind of piled up outside restaurants It's another thing to think Okay, I'm gonna build a drone company and fly these hamburgers from from A to B So just it's a it's a huge vision and that's sort of a very long-term vision How how does it work today? Yeah, so you open our app you discover all the local vendors that are there the The the local supermarket the pharmacy The the foods the coffee vendor whatever it is you transact like a normal basket a normal shopping experience and The only difference is at the end of it your address We confirm your address and we ask you to drop a pin on a map to where you would like the product delivered and That's it like the user experience is just a normally e-commerce experience But it just it gets a bit more exciting than normal after that because three minutes later The product lands in your front lawn or your back lawn, and so it's yeah, it's pretty wild and Like I mean talk us through. Yeah, it lands. I mean you've seen in the video there We we've fly it about between 50 and 80 meters at about 80 kilometers per hour And so our maximum delivery time is three minutes from the store to the house when we arrive at your house We descend to about 15 meters and we'll hover there We look for a safe flat place in animate to deliver on to and we hovered 15 meters We open the cargo bay doors and we winch the product down to the ground on a biodegradable linen thread and so it's very green it's it's extremely safe and We can deliver as we have done coffees beers fresh eggs lots of people test us by ordering fresh eggs thinking that they're gonna get an omelette Yeah, and we've never cracked an egg in 85,000 flights I mean 85,000 flights will come on in a minute and talk about where you are with this because You know it like I said when you when you watch the video It feels like we're looking into a sort of a pretty futuristic world But this is this is sort of very this is sort of very real and in a way It's sort of I've had the pleasure of going and seeing it and Latte's and cappuccinos fresh lattes and cappuccinos being delivered Perfectly on to somebody's garden. It's you know, it really does need to be seen people don't believe it Yeah, even though we've got 85,000 flights under the belt and Drone delivery is going to replace 100% of road-based delivery for suburban communities And when you see you have to see it in real life to understand why that is there the aircraft are silent You can't hear them when their cruise altitude and there's so much more efficient We carry it pretty big basket of products like we've served meals for families of five people We can carry eight coffees and pastries And the aircraft is a set of parameters that if we wanted to we could expand into grocery No problem. We would just increase the the amount of energy we put into the aircraft So so you have the basic toolkit of a massive disruption to last mile that we're on the cusp of scaling across Europe I mean that but that that's a huge statement right drone delivery is going to replace a hundred percent of road-based delivery in Suburban areas now, you know, we all know we've just we've just heard from the guys that get here I mean, we all know drone or on demand delivery has exploded over this last decade. I mean what What role will drones play? Long term how does drones fit into the ecosystem? We've got riders you've talked a little bit about suburban communities and we'll come on to talk about what man is doing today but but paint me a picture of What role drones will play in delivery and and you know, how long is it going to take us to get there? Yeah, so we if I give you some examples of who you know the end the community is our customer So we roll out the infrastructure. It's the community's infrastructure. It's a replacement of their roads It allows everyone in the community to move things around Efficiently so if you think about the local bookstore in in or and more one of our first times we operated in It's like 10,000 people in or more and it's well spread out that bookstore now has a better product than Amazon has For those customers like that bookstore can get all of their books sold online and delivered in less than five minutes So that's a pretty powerful tool to give a community and so our role is First of all embrace and work with the local community get all of the local vendors on board get the big brands on board as well So we work with Coca-Cola. We work with just ease with Ben and Jerry's number of big brands And we're just we're learn we're still in learn mode. I'd like how do how do communities use this? so in the first time we operated in Every single restaurant and coffee shop and local store works with us everything one of them they still work with us and 38% of the people have ordered from us in the town of 10,000 people That is a phenomenal penetration rate that no role-based delivery system has ever achieved Right and the reason that is that we now make certain perishable products viable that weren't viable before for delivery So in what world did anyone ever order a coffee and have it delivered? There was never that world we now have people in Less well just over a year of operation in this town with over a hundred deliveries to their homes There's a cohort of people that are just that is their behavior now. There's no longer drone delivery It is just delivery. They don't even come out of their house to film the drone anymore So we've already reached this behavioral norm where it's just okay and absolutely normal to use it So so you talked about you mentioned or and more that the town in which you're live So mana has been built out of Ireland Maybe just talk us through the first towns you you launched first in or and more you've just launched your second town in Dublin So this is this is very real very live. We just talk us through how you operate in those towns what you're learning Yeah, so we we've just opened up a town called Balbriggan Which is in Dublin and we intentionally did that because it's actually the second most population dense area of Ireland Right, so there's 7,000 people per square mile We have to deliver on something the size of that table to get to them, right? so we've given us have a really difficult challenge and We've already we're already doing, you know, three times more deliveries than we did in the last town and You know by January we'll be doing about four or five hundred deliveries a day Which is the world's largest drone delivery program but we chose that town because there's 35,000 people there's 10,000 homes and There's no road-based delivery at least no profitable road-based delivery And so we're working with all the local partners there and we fly off the roof of the supermarket And we have a dark kitchen up there where we make food. We make coffee. We make pastries We have all these stored products there So the books the hardware store all those things from a central place that local vendors stock for us So the local vendors at the moment how you operate local vendors are coming to you You've got a sort of a dark kitchen set up your own coffees and you are flying the drones from the roof of a Tesco Yeah, and right now we have just just for one aircraft will do about eight deliveries per hour So right now we have four only four aircraft serve and 35,000 people we probably scale that to between eight and ten aircraft and That probably is all that town will need because they're pretty efficient. Yeah We'll come on and talk about this sort of Scaling journey in a minute because that's I think that's sort of one of the key things here We're talking about four to five hundred flights a day eighty flights a day now close to four to five hundred flights a day And then you know, how do we think about getting to ten million flights a day? I mean, that's obviously the ambition here, but Before we go there. I mean You know, we're talking about dropping coffee. They're all sort of sounds very Simple as you and I sit here and talk about it dropping coffees into people's gardens But this is a hugely complex business. You're building hardware. You're building complex software And then you're dealing with a regulatory environment And and drones are regulated by the same in the same regulatory environment as an air as an airline You're effectively building a new airline Maybe just talk us through How you tackle that complexity And maybe you know without going we don't want to sort of send people into a post-lunch coma going too deep on on Regulation, but of course it's the key question here, right? Well, how is this regulated? What licenses do you have today? How is this going to evolve? Yeah, so When I started the business that the picture emerged very quickly that this is a really hard thing to do because of not not really because of the regulation the regulation or is a kind of a Almost an endorsement of what you're doing or an audit of what you're doing in the end We're gonna be flying 10 million flights a day. It better be perfect It has to be perfect because there's no there isn't a we'll roll out a fix for that bug later on So so the way you have to think about this is it's about reliability engineering first and foremost It's about what happens when everything that can fail fails because the law large numbers says that right? So you heard the the lilium guy earlier on talking about a battery fire What happens? How do you manage a battery fire when you're over somebody's house? What what you do so all those it's it's not the core the core product any engineering team can build a drone And they can also build a software stack all of these components to what we do are not, you know nuclear fusion There are relatively straightforward engineering concepts But it's the scaling in terms of throughput and volume that breaks all standard theories and so you have to you just have to design for Every worst assumption and then add a buffer to that so one small example We have we fly out with we have a 1.4 kilowatt battery right the worst-case flight We have a normal situation is about 400 watt hours So we already have three and a half times the energy we need We have to assume if we're flying in a maximum, you know airspeed of 25 meters per second So about 75 kilometers per hour we have to assume that the wind more than doubles in strength and changes direction by 180 degrees and We didn't deliver the cargo with to carry it home. That's our equation. So it's those and those levels of extra buffer that make it really really hard and then talking to a regulator About this concept of you know, it's like you have two heads You say I'm just going to fly 25 kilo a kilogram aircraft over populated areas without their permission To deliver hamburgers and coffee. It's not a pretty conversation at the start of it I'm sure and so you need to have aviation credentials and we're regulated as an airline as an aircraft manufacturer and an operator and we have a European wide license to do that and it is really the most difficult part of business You've said to me before You know, you're you're building an airline and an aircraft and an airport all at the same time Oh, yeah, and also software company and an e-commerce company and any commerce company and a software company So, I mean, you know, we the The complexity of what you're doing and I know you you is is kind of mind-boggling to a certain extent And I know you guys have done a lot of Testing and safety testing. It's one of the things I hear you talk an awful lot about it is sort of the safety testing because This is an environment in which as you said the stakes are high if something goes wrong the regulatory environment and an appetite here could sort of change Could change on a whim You mentioned you're the the first and only Drone company to have a European wide license operating license Which is incredibly exciting You're based out of Ireland Maybe just why Ireland it may not be sort of obvious to people As to why that might provide an advantage. Why will an Irish startup work? Some people say it's because I'm Irish. I'm in Ireland But it's not I mean the last business as I created with Mexico City and the United States and that's where you go Where the action is yeah, and in drones the action is in Europe number one Within Europe Ireland is a leader on the drone regulatory space So the Irish aviation authority has decided that it wants to lead the way and define the regulations and champion the regulations So that's one part is that we have a regulator that literally we can have a In iterative Conversation an honest one about where the strengths are where the weaknesses are and they're learning as much as we are at the same It's a partnership and there's no other world if you start this business in the United States You could hit the pause button for three years and then catch up with what Ireland is doing So we have an unfair advantage by being in Ireland to the regulatory space We don't get a free ride. We just get to go at the pace of a startup, which is incredible Then the other part is I don't need to rent a wind tunnel because you know We test in the worst country on the planet to test the drone delivery business It pisses rain every day you get every season pretty much every day and the wind like we get to avail of You know winds on the west coast of Ireland that are just phenomenally difficult to work with so the 85,000 flights We have on the clock none of them are in benign weather. They're all in challenging weather So being able to do that and kind of harden the product in those harsh environments means that you're kind of ready to take on the rest of the world straight away Whereas if you go out with a product that's been tested in California, you know or or you know somewhere with a benign weather condition You're shocked to the system when you get to the Atlantic West Coast of Ireland The problem we have to solve We hover over your house that you know 15 meters and it takes we dropped the product down on the thread Yeah, it takes about six seconds for that to happen And of course if there's a really strong wind blowing the aircraft is doing this to stay in position To keep the bag to land on the table, but of course the wind doesn't want to play ball with that So the winds pushing the bag out So we use LiDAR underneath the aircraft to track the bag and bank the opposite direction to put it onto the thing That isn't very easy to test and not spill the coffee and that we never spilled the coffee or broken an egg So like to do all that stuff you can try and reproduce those environments if you want, but it's just come to Ireland It's easier. Yeah. No, I mean it's been phenomenal to see and and what about What about some of the challenges the big question marks that come from drones? I'm thinking about things like privacy Concerns whether from The regulator but even more so from the communities in which you're working with noise What do you hear from them? You know people naturally? I think I often hear this when we talk about drone delivery What does this mean for privacy drones flying overhead? They're gonna be noisy Do we want to live in a world where we've got these noisy things over our heads? How do you how do you deal with that? What are your responses? So I mean half the audience here. I'd be pretty certain are thinking drones are noisy What about my privacy like we've surveyed we've done lots of surveys and the top item that comes out is privacy Yeah, the second one is noise. The third one is job destruction And the fourth one is safety and actually safety is the only one that people should be concerned about Our aircraft makes less noise than an electric car does passing by your house So the noise is easy to fix if you have large props. That's how you fix the noise of drones So they spin more slowly. They're more efficient and you actually can't hear our aircraft if they fly over your house That's important and privacy is also very easy. We have no data We record absolutely no customer data. We don't know your name. We don't know your email your phone number none of that We've done store any of it. We have no recording equipment on the aircraft except for flight logs So so privacy is an easy one to behave around but but to communicate that and to make you know populations or communities feel Confident in that is a different story. Yeah, and you know big tech has kind of shot everyone in the foot With some of the ways they've collected data and it's on us to communicate properly and clearly with the communities that are Giving us permission to fly over them that there is no privacy issue. There is no safety issue There is and they know like we have zero complaints I should say from the 10,000 people that we've served in in Galway for the last 14 months zero complaints And and you know the 10,000 people is enough to surface a few trolls and we don't expect any Genuine complaints around the noise because it it's solved and And so it's in the end you're asking communities to yeah You're giving them a great tool but but you have to do it with the communities on board and so we take those issues and those concerns extremely seriously and So net net after you know after we've before we go into a town and after we've rolled into a town There's no complaints and 98% of people that we've surveyed Say that they will want and will pay for drone delivery So we know generally people want it. It's for us to make sure that we do it properly and Talk us in terms of the where you're operating right now. You've touched on some of the things that you're delivering What are people ordering is it a novelty because this this was always the thing, right? Like if a drone delivery operation shows up in your town I mean first thing I'm gonna do is get on and Get this drone to my house and film it and share it and we've seen it on Twitter And you want to see this in real life go go check out the manna videos on Twitter Does it become real over time does this move from novelty to this is how I Get my my coffee. How what are you seeing in the all the first orders are jelly snakes and Chocolates that's the number one thing that comes out at first Because it's the kids right so we go to all the schools. We bring the drone We tell them about it and so we program the children to be our evangelists, right? So we get orders for jelly snakes and chocolates as a result But but very quickly the adults realize they can get a coffee and there is it There's definitely a hesitance to be the first people on the street to get the circus, you know So it is a circus like this thing. Everyone comes out At night time it's got all these bright, you know aviation lights and it looks Really amazing, but the whole street is out and they're all filming and you know, you might be in your pajamas or something So no, there is hesitancy to do that, but once the damn breaks it is a flood Everyone once they see that, you know, it's not crazy to do this They say do I do it and then normal state, which is where we are in our first town Normal state is the number one thing the people ordered by drone is coffee That is the killer app for drone delivery, but with that that evolves too So, you know if I was to break it down, you know coffee pastries breakfast that kind of stuff is what keeps us busy For the first five or six hours of the operation convenience stores a single basket goods and we can fly 14,000 of the 19,000 Tesco products. So there's a bit lot of choice. You can get anything you want at the same time Not all of them not yet. And we get we carry three kilos and 30,000 my weekly Tesco shop. Yeah No, we do aim to carry that single basket market, which is a gigantic market the convenience store market. Yeah, and You know, so people Once once they know that it's just normal to order drone delivery They start to test you with things they genuinely need and I remember when you came to see it It was an order for a head of broccoli and some nappy cream Yeah, and that was one order. I think it was about 6 p.m They had a broccoli cost 60 cents. Yeah, and we charge five dollars for that delivery That that family needed a head of broccoli There was hell to pay because our people for those that don't know dinner is meat and three veg always, right? Potatoes being one of the veg compulsory and so but it was great. It was a great idea because yeah It's amazing. It's sort of the pharmacy is huge. So people get pharmacy late at night Everything, I mean and that's I mean that's that's the beauty of it, but But we're talking about two towns in Ireland right now where you're bringing food trucks onto the top of a supermarket I mean Going from where you are today To 10 million flights a day. Just talk us through when will everybody here be seeing drone delivery in their suburban towns and suburban Communities, what's the path to going from where mana is today to to really mass rolling out? And what does that look like? Yeah, so there's regulations that were written into law in in the EU last March That become law 1st of January 2023 we want to be ready to scale across Europe on that day And we want to go as parallel as fast as we can across all of suburban Europe as quickly as we can because the market is open For us from 23 onwards. It's for us to be ready to do that scaling. So the challenges we have to solve Primarily around manufacturing at scale this device and getting well getting that device certified as well So those are difficult, but I'm pretty confident. We will be starting to scale in 23 onwards to across Europe coming to a town near you in 2023 indeed We're we're coming close on time, but before we we finish up I mean you're talking about rolling out now in 2023, but you're obviously going up against some big giants in the space I mean Google kind of well known for operating Google wing, which I and I think they have an operation here Operation here in Helsinki. We know Amazon have had a drone program in the past I mean you're going up against some giants in this space like why can mana win? And yeah, so like I mean Amazon were the first company really to say drone delivery could happen So all credit Amazon They've since not done a whole lot Whereas wing wing are my favorite drone delivery company outside of mana. They've an awesome product It's it's available right here in Helsinki. It's a great product and they we have the same dream We have but do I do I fear wing? No, like I'm happy to share a trillion plus dollar industry with alphabet If that's what what it takes, but you know in the end. I'm a founder. I've always I've always thrived You know I was always had success as of my teams in beating the big guy, you know Or surviving the big guy because small teams and entrepreneurial teams we wake up in the morning saying we want We have a mission to change the world to make the world a better place Greener to empower communities to create jobs to just make life better for everybody and build a gigantic business That has our signature on it. Our name is written on the circuit board that goes on to that aircraft And we're very proud of it people who are for big companies with no disrespect for them at all You know wake up to learn to build a career. We've no interest in building in a career We have a mission and we are absolutely rabid about making sure that we deliver on that So passion is the chick is the difference. I think the level of passion and and worst case look, you know if you think about it, there's Just the UK market alone. There's 850 million deliveries a year in the UK alone There's a big big prize and you can multiply that by a thousand for the rest of the world It is such a gigantic space being able to fix last mile is so big that I'd be very happy grow its reach Right. Yeah, I mean of course like there's new the new categories that never existed before like even burgers and fries Not really a good product to deliver But if you can deliver it in two minutes 45 seconds, which is our flight time in our new town Burgers and fries and coffees and nappy cream become viable things to deliver and our cost base We never mentioned this our cost base is a fraction of what it costs to get a human in a car to deliver a product And I mean on that note. We won't sort of dive into the cost base, but I've seen it and it's it's incredibly exciting We're privileged to to be able to back you guys to do this and and all I can say is keep your eyes peeled drone delivery Manor drone delivery coming to you guys by by 2023 and thank you very much Bobby for taking thank you Today, thank you