Serial entrepreneur Bobby Healy has developed a talent for spotting opportunity. The past three decades or so have seen him found several businesses, from games development from travel technology, with varying degrees of success.

His new venture is quite literally taking off. Manna Aero has been working on beginning drone deliveries in Ireland, aiming to take delivery vehicles off the street, removing emissions from the process and ensuring customers can get their goods in a timely manner over short distances.

It is not all that surprising when you look at Healy’s roots. He comes from an entrepreneurial background. If you grew up in a certain part of Dublin, you knew the Healy family – specifically the dress shop owned by Doris Healy, The Sisters, which she still runs with her son, David.

His father was, as he describes it, in the rag trade. That doesn’t mean he was bankrolled by affluent parents though. “We were a typical middle-class family in Kilmacud in the 1980s,” he says. “Nobody was doing well back then.”

Although most people know Healy from his time at CarTrawler, he started his tech career as a games developer. It was an interest from his childhood that blossomed into a career and put him on the path to his current success.

“I was obsessed with learning about programming and video-game writing. I dropped everything, I dropped my studies and screwed everything up for it,” he said. “To this day, it’s still the best time of my life, that phase where…