Joby Aviation, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Thank you. Good afternoon and evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Joby Aviation's second quarter 2026 financial results conference call. My name is Teresa Thuruthiyil, and I'm Joby's Head of Investor Relations. We will begin today with prepared comments from JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Rodrigo Brumana, Chief Financial Officer. For the Q&A portion of today's call, we will also be joined by our Executive Chairman, Paul Sciarra. Please note that our discussion today will include statements regarding future events and financial performance, as well as statements of belief, expectation, and intent. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied.

For a more detailed discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our filings with the SEC and the safe harbor disclaimer contained in today's shareholder letter. During the call, we'll refer both to GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in our Q2 2026 shareholder letter, which you can find on our investor relations website, along with a replay of this call. All of that said, I'll turn the call over to JoeBen.

Thank you, Teresa, and thank you everyone for joining us today. It's an incredibly exciting time to be part of our industry. After many years of hard work designing, building, testing, and flying our aircraft across thousands of flights and tens of thousands of miles, we're now at the point where we're preparing for commercial service. I'm pleased to confirm that next month we intend to complete our first eIPP flights in Texas. The White House-backed eIPP program has the potential to significantly accelerate our path to commercial service, and we're grateful to the FAA for their continued partnership as we look ahead to these flights. The flights in Texas will be the first of many that bring Joby together with state and local bodies, as well as the FAA, to prove out the value and operational maturity of our technology.

Over the course of a week, we'll be flying routes across the Dallas-Fort Worth area that lay the groundwork for future commercial operations. These vertical takeoff and landing flights will demonstrate how our aircraft can transform travel across a major metropolitan area. Over time, and with extensive involvement and oversight from the FAA, we expect flights under the eIPP program to progress from those with only a pilot on board to those carrying non-paying passengers and eventually paying passengers. In preparation for those flights, I'm pleased to confirm that we continue to target carrying our first passengers this year. As we look ahead to commercializing our service, I've never been more excited about the potential for vertical lift. We see that potential demonstrated every day through our Blade business as customers choose to pay for journeys that give them meaningful time back.

We acquired Blade just about a year ago with strong conviction in their team, their product, and the opportunity presented by the network they've developed across the U.S. and the south of France. Over the past year, that conviction has only strengthened. The business continues to grow quarter-on-quarter, so much so that the core constraint we're facing on many routes is now aircraft availability rather than passenger demand. The number of seats sold in Q2 was up over 50% from the same time last year, marking Blade's best-performing Q2 on record in that respect. This quarter also saw the highest number of new flyers going to and from New York City airports since 2023. While route expansions contributed to more than 40% year-on-year growth in Hamptons' revenue.

We also saw positive impact from a number of key events around the world, including the World Cup and the U.S. Open here in the U.S., as well as the Monaco Grand Prix, where we sold roughly 4,500 seats to or from the race. The last quarter was so strong, in fact, that today I'm pleased to confirm that we are raising our full-year revenue guidance after Blade's revenue grew 32% year-on-year in the first half. Looking ahead, we're drawing on Joby's existing relationship with Uber to drive increased demand. This is in addition to a new partnership between Blade and Visa signed during the quarter, which gives Visa Infinite consumer and business cardholders access to a premium suite of benefits on Blade's signature airport service in New York.

Vertical takeoff and landing has been our North Star at Joby since day one, and our experience integrating Blade over the past year has only reinforced how central it is to the customer experience. Flying between airports is something aviation has done successfully for a long time. The real opportunity comes from taking customers from where they begin their journeys to where they want to go, saving them the time and friction of traveling through an airport. Blade's experience with the New York to Hampton service brings this point to life. Customers can book a conventional fixed-wing aircraft from Teterboro to Montauk today for roughly one-third of the price of a helicopter flight from Manhattan, and yet utilization of the helicopter service remains significantly higher. That tells us just how much customers value the time savings and convenience of beginning their journey in the city and avoiding the airport altogether.

Being able to take off vertically is a fundamental part of what drives Blade's success today, and we believe the opportunity becomes even greater with the introduction of the Joby aircraft, which is quieter, less expensive to operate, and designed specifically for journeys like these. In July, I had the opportunity to experience this convenience for myself, flying to and from the Farnborough Airshow. Despite being one of the world's largest air shows, everyone still arrives by road or rail on journeys that can take up to 2 hours. We ran our Blade service there for the first time, connecting central London to Farnborough Airport in just 18 minutes, selling out seats on several days and underscoring the value of vertical lift in the U.K. market.

While we were at Farnborough, we signed a multi-year definitive agreement with Virgin Atlantic that builds on that opportunity and sets out a path for us to launch service across the U.K. with a particular focus on London and Manchester. We also held more than 150 meetings with regulators and stakeholders from markets around the globe, including a veritable alphabet soup of regulators that included the DfT and the CAA from the U.K., EASA from Europe, GACA and the GCAA from the Middle East, the USDOT and the FAA, as well as ANAC from Brazil, to name just a few. There was one common thread amongst all these meetings. They are just as excited about vertical lift as we are and are watching Joby's progress closely.

They're seeing the positive ripple effects of the eIPP program, and they're asking how they can unlock the same level of momentum we're seeing in markets like the U.S. and the U.A.E. As well as seeing great support on the regulatory side in those markets, we're also making incredible progress with infrastructure. Earlier this week, we announced a strategic partnership with Atoms, the industrial AI infrastructure company founded by Travis Kalanick. Travis co-founded Uber in 2009, the same year that I founded Joby. Since our first jam session in 2015, the one that seeded Uber Elevate, he's been all-in on electric flight. He's one of the most dynamic founders of his generation with a rare ability to see the whole system and turn ambitious ideas into real industries.

Together, we're working on doing just that again with a joint understanding that the next revolution in transportation requires not only new vehicles, but also new infrastructure. Our shared vision goes beyond air taxis. With the rollout of autonomous vehicles gaining significant momentum, we see an opportunity to create a new class of mobility hub designed from the outset to support both technologies. These hubs will combine takeoff and landing and charging for electric aircraft with charging and depot services for autonomous vehicles, sharing fixed costs, creating stronger operating economics, delivering seamless journeys for our customers, and even greater value for the communities in which we'll operate. The Atoms team is world-class with deep expertise across acquisition, financing, development, electrification, and permitting, and after 8 years of working in stealth, recently raised $1.7 billion with lead investment from a16z to support their growth.

Our own aviation experts will now work alongside the Atoms team to identify and develop the best sites for our network. We'll be focusing initially on Florida, New York, and Texas, the same markets where we're preparing to launch early operations under the eIPP program, as well as here in California. In addition to our own progress on infrastructure, we continue to see accelerating momentum and investment by states and airports here in the U.S., infrastructure partners across the industry, and countries around the world. Florida enacted legislation allowing the state to fund certain vertiport projects at up to 100%, committing millions of dollars to activate new sites all over the state. We're excited that Orlando is already moving forward with developing a vertiport in the central terminal area of one of the country's busiest commercial airports.

In Dubai at the Marina, the second of four vertiports being built by our partners is nearly complete, and we continue to see meaningful progress on infrastructure in markets like Japan, the wider UAE, Korea, and Australia. To make the most of this momentum, we still have to deliver our part, the aircraft, and the service, and I'm pleased to report excellent progress there, too. We now have five of our electric air taxis in the air, including our first FAA-conforming aircraft, and we have 12 more aircraft in various stages of the production process, including two set for delivery this year. As we've said before, manufacturing is hard. Anyone who has tried to do it at scale will tell you that, and building conforming aircraft represents a step change in complexity.