Archer Aviation Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Welcome to Archer's earnings call.

This is Kate Quehl, Archer's Head of Investor Relations. Today, we will be making forward-looking statements that are based on current assumptions. We don't undertake any obligation to update those assumptions as a result of new information or future events. Risks and uncertainties may cause our actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. For more information about potential risks and uncertainties, review the risk factors in our SEC filings. Today, we will also be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of those measures is included in our earnings release from today. Now, I'll turn it over to Adam.

Adam? Thanks, Kate. Today marks an important inflection point for Archer.

Let me spend some time walking you through the rationale for the exciting transaction we announced with Boeing earlier today. We entered into agreements to acquire three highly innovative Boeing-owned companies, Wisk Aero, Insitu, and SkyGrid, in exchange for Boeing taking a strategic equity stake in Archer. We anticipate closing the transaction by the end of the year. This partnership will help accelerate the evolution you've heard me talk about for a long time. Archer is a diversified aerospace and defense platform with a physical AI product portfolio that will span air taxis, unmanned aircraft systems from Group 2 to Group 5, purpose-built AI for aviation, and the vertical technology stack for autonomous flight. Let me walk you through how we got here.

I founded Archer with one goal, finding the most efficient path to commercializing air taxis, and built a world-class team to do it. We remain incredibly focused on this goal, as air taxi will always be core to our mission, and Midnight is well on its way. We went from an unknown in 2018 to the front of the pack on FAA certification today. Defense, as I've been saying for the last 18 months, is becoming one of the largest near-term markets for the VTOL industry. We first announced our partnership with Anduril at the end of 2024. Palmer Luckey, one of the founders, had come to me with a concept for an autonomous dual-use loyal wingman for attack reconnaissance helicopters like Apache, and they chose Archer's team to build it alongside them. Since then, our teams have been building this aircraft together.

Archer took all our learnings from years of eVTOL development, airframe design, rotors, powertrain, and actuation systems, knowledge from the Midnight program, and put it into something new, a clean-sheet autonomous hybrid aircraft platform for both commercial and defense. Last month at Farnborough, we jointly revealed the Halo Thunder platform, and I'm confident it is revolutionary, not evolutionary. Unlike what many others are doing, this is a clean-sheet first principles approach targeting both commercial use cases, including logistics, humanitarian, medical, and maritime, as well as multi-decade defense programs of record with allied forces. This is why for the past year, we've been assembling a world-class Halo Thunder team focused on developing this platform. With this transaction with Boeing, we can utilize Wisk's incredible talent to round out that team.

Wisk traces back to Larry Page, who gave this industry its start nearly 20 years ago, and they're right down the road from us here in Silicon Valley. Their engineers have spent nearly two decades building some of the most advanced autonomy, flight control, and sensor technology in the industry, designed from the start for autonomous flight. The opportunity is clear to me. Deploy and harden the technology on Halo Thunder first, then fold it into future iterations of the air taxi when the FAA is ready to certify autonomy. I'm confident that our planned acquisition of Wisk can accelerate the Halo Thunder program at a fraction of the time it would have taken us to achieve the same results organically. As part of this transaction, we will also acquire Insitu, one of the most trusted and reputable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, ISR, drone manufacturers in the U.S.

It is profitable today with over $200 million in annual revenue across 35 countries. They have built more than 4,000 Group 2 and 3 UAS to date. Those UAS have flown nearly 2 million flight hours autonomously, giving it one of the largest data sets of its kind, and that data will feed directly into our autonomy development. Insitu will give Archer an immediate sizable revenue base to grow from. The key driver of this transaction was the relationship we've built with Boeing, especially former Wisk CEO, now VP of product for Boeing Commercial, Bryan Yutko. Boeing is synonymous with American-built aviation, and the deal structure shows how leaned in they are on our future together. All stock with a lockup, a collaboration across many new fronts, committed future equity investments in Archer, warrants at exercise prices far in excess of our current price.

For both companies, the core of this deal is the opportunity to jointly drive innovation across aerospace, defense, and autonomy and deliver long-term value for shareholders. I want to thank Kelly Ortberg and the Boeing leadership for the trust and belief in Archer as the right long-term partner. Importantly, I've tasked my team with integrating these companies in a thoughtful, synergistic way that will not structurally increase our overall cash burn. The focus is clear. On the other side of this deal is a stronger Archer with an end-to-end physical AI platform for aerospace and defense. Last quarter, I called Archer a dual-threat company, a nod to our air taxi and dual-use autonomous VTOL aircraft program. This quarter, we shared more on the strategy for the third key pillar of our diversification approach: purpose-built AI for aerospace and defense. We introduced ZEE, the world's leading aviation-specific foundation model.

ZEE is a unified intelligence platform built on ADS-B, ATC communications, maps and charts, aircraft movements, terrain, and weather data. Just last week, we announced that ZEE has delivered a breakthrough in aviation safety: highly accurate, real-time prediction of airport surface trajectories. To bring this technology safely into the aviation ecosystem, our teams are working with the government agencies and customers to rigorously validate ZEE in the real world. We couldn't be more excited to pair ZEE with SkyGrid, and we believe together those technologies can deliver a next-gen air traffic management product that can play a critical role in modernizing airspaces around the world. I see a clear path to significant AI revenue, and the team is heads down building toward it. Let me circle back to Midnight. Through it all, air taxi remains a top priority, and the program made tremendous progress this quarter.

This quarter, we flew multiple piloted aircraft on an almost daily basis across our fleet, and oftentimes those aircraft flew multiple times a day in testing across piloted VTOL and CTOL flights, including our first intercity flights here in California. Over the next few months, you can expect us to begin flying in the L.A. area based out of the Hawthorne Airport, and subsequently commence operations under the White House's eIPP later this year in Texas. We also continued our industry-leading progress against our FAA certification program for Midnight. I believe we remain the only industry OEM to be out of policy and in the fourth and final phase of the FAA's type certification process with a fully accepted means of compliance.

Notably, this quarter, the FAA approved our quality management system, which hardens our ability to perform FAA for-credit conformity findings across the aircraft, as well as its components and systems. We're actively working with the FAA on for-credit testing this year. On the infrastructure front, we co-launched ACES, the America's Consortium for Electric Skyways, alongside BETA and Macquarie. It's an industry-first approach to deploy interoperable charging infrastructure across the U.S. and align OEMs on a unified approach, which is critical for scale and to lower cost for consumers. I'm proud to take this on arm in arm with Kyle and the team at BETA and look forward to welcoming many others who want to join the mission. We are executing all of this from a continued position of financial strength with $1.6 billion in liquidity. I started Archer to change the way the world moves.

Nearly a decade in, I've never been more confident or more all in. With that, I'll turn it over to Priya.