The idea for drone delivery startup Manna Aero came to Bobby Healy one night when he was sitting in his garden with a hankering for chips.

Chips, he says, are one of the items that don’t work well for conventional food deliveries as they tend to lose their crispness during transport — after half an hour on the back of a delivery bike they have gone limp and soggy.

Healy, a prominent figure in the Irish tech scene and the former CarTrawler chief technology officer, wondered if drones could be a way of speeding things up.

Today Manna is offering restaurants and dark kitchens drone delivery as a service, promising them a three-minute delivery within a two-mile radius, for less than the cost of road-based deliveries.

Manna is not alone. Aviation authorities around the world are starting to allow trials of drone deliveries and other companies, including Amazon, are making a play for the market. Wing, the drone delivery service owned by Alphabet, for example, has started offering commercial services in Virginia, Canberra and Helsinki.

Manna is preparing for “the big year” in 2023 though, when European regulations will allow its services to start scaling across the continent.

Manna has signed partnerships with major brands and retailers, including JustEat, Samsung, Ben & Jerry’s and Tesco to test out drone delivery.

It is also working with a number of small independent coffee shops and retailers, for whom the additional delivery option became crucial during the recent lockdowns.

Manna raises $25m to prepare for big scale-up for drones in 2023

In a small Irish town, people are ordering coffee and broccoli via drone

Intercom has long been the big success story of the Irish startup ecosystem. Founded in 2011, the developer of communication tools for businesses is the country's only "unicorn" worth more than $1bn. It has raised a hefty $241m with high-profile backers such as Index Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg

Based mainly in Dublin and San Francisco, the company has managed to prove wrong those critics who said back in 2018 that the chatbot was dead. Eoghan Mccabe, the chief executive, has long argued that when combined with the right kind of AI software, a chatbot on a webpage can build customer loyalty and help business. It says that customers using Intercom see conversion rates and sales increase by 82%.

The company now has more than 25k paying customers and many of the have been able to automate responses to the most common customer questions and cut response times down on others.

More broadly than chatbots, Intercom sells itself as a streamlined way to get to know and interact with customers. Intercom monitors customer behaviour and allows its customer to slice and dice data to target specific groups of customers with marketing emails and messages, tech support and more. In this way, Intercom competes with Zendesk, Salesforce.com and MailChimp.

ApisProtect may not be the biggest Irish startups, but it's in an exciting field (much beloved by Sifted) of bee-tech.

Founded in 2017, ApisProtect develops internet-connected beehive sensors and has raised more money than any bee-tech business in the world.

It's hive sensors monitor temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, sound and movement; data which can be analysed by machine learning to provide alerts for issues like disease, pests or unusual behaviour.

“Our machine learning turns data into useful information,” Fiona Murphy told Sifted last year. “We can show beekeepers which colonies are alive or dead, which are performing well or not, so they can decide if they need to feed them, apply insecticide or slap some extra insulation on the hives.”

ApisProtect has been training its AI with 20 beekeeper partners, 200 sensor units and 10m honey bees monitored across the US, Ireland, the UK and South Africa. “We don’t want to train an algorithm on Irish beehives and expect that to land in California and work,” says Murphy.

The startup has some rivals in the form of BeeHero (Israel), Pollenity (Bulgaria) and Arnia (Italy) and so this is a hot field which ApisProtect hopes to dominate.