Ever wish you could skip a 90-minute airport drive and be there in 10 minutes? Quietly on battery power, perhaps? That's the promise behind electric air taxis. I'm Katy Perry. My guest today here on StockTwits is Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer Aviation, ticker ACHR. Adam, how are you? Welcome to the show.
I'm great. Glad to be here.
It's great to have you here. I was just complimenting you on your very cool jacket. I know you got a backstory behind that that we'll get into, but I want to start with Archer. Archer is a very popular stock among retail investors as you know. We've been sourcing questions from our community for the past few days. I know you guys had earnings, but let's start with people who might not be familiar with you guys quite yet. What is Archer doing today and what is the future vision of the company?
Well, we build electric air taxis that are used in both civil and defense applications. So, some people call them eVTOLs, electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. So, these are aircraft that are designed to fly in and around urban environments. So, think less than 100-mile type trips, maybe it's a Manhattan to JFK type of trip where instead of driving there, which might take you 60 or 90 minutes, we can fly you there in five or 10 minutes. And on the defense side, there's also this whole new category of what they call autonomous and attritable aircraft. So I think unmanned and low-cost systems that are being used to replace the very expensive systems that we have out there. A whole new fleet of aircraft that are being built and we're building the future of defense as well.
You got me at the JFK to Manhattan because if you live in New York, you know that could be a two-hour schlep. Sometimes longer than the actual flight you took. So that's very very cool and interesting and I know there's some other players building in this space as well. So would love to understand I guess first like your history with the company, you founded it, kind of when did this idea come about and also how you differentiate from some of the other players in the space people might be familiar with — Beta, Vertical, Joby — how are you guys different?
Yeah so the industry really came out of a project that NASA started working on 40 years ago. So NASA was trying to figure out how to use multiple electric engines to fly airplanes. And when you do that, you get these incredible benefits. You can build a much safer aircraft because you have tons of redundancy. You can build much quieter aircraft because you're spinning propellers at much slower speeds. And then, you know, ultimately can drive the cost down to something that's much more affordable rather than helicopters. So this was worked on for a long time. Really in 2009, Larry Page started a company called Zee Aero that really kicked off the whole industry. He went and approached a professor in Stanford named Ilan Kroo, sort of a famous aerodynamics professor, and they started building this company. So Zee Aero really helped usher in a lot of the early days of the eVTOL industry. In 2016 Uber started a product called Uber Elevate where they really put a business model behind this category and they said well if people are traveling in these really short distances if we could fly them there for similar costs of what rideshare is there could be a huge business built around that. So a famous white paper was written by a guy named Nikhil Goel who's now Chief Commercial Officer at Archer. And they put out this concept in 2018. Morgan Stanley's analyst Adam Jonas put out this big report saying eVTOLs are the next multi-trillion dollar industry and that really got everything going.
So I had been working on a previous startup and I sold that startup and used the money to start Archer and I launched Archer in 2018 and my whole concept was to take Archer from really what the industry had been very focused on R&D and take it to more of a commercial product. So Archer is heavily focused on commercialization. There's a lot of ways to cut up the industry. There are folks that are targeting passengers, others that are focused on cargo. So Archer is very focused on the civil passenger market. We're also focused on the unmanned defense market. So, some of our competitors do different things, but they're all great companies. Beta, for example, is doing both eVTOL and conventional, so fixed-wing as well. So they'll start in cargo and then move over into the passenger stuff over time. We differentiate from companies like Joby where they are building out their own networks to operate and we are focused on selling aircraft. So we all have similar spaces that we play in but we all have a little bit of a different twist on the model.
Very very helpful context because you do see eVTOL thrown around and to your point different people are doing different things and I know you mentioned the civil use case. Let's start there and then I definitely a lot of people asking about the defense — but Midnight, Midnight, that's your electric air taxi. Tell me a little bit about how this works. This is not something most of us have seen, have experienced yet. And a lot of questions I have just reading up on you guys is how does this work from a, you know, FAA? How does this all happen? How do you get permitted, licensed? So where does it all stand on certification and what does that process look like for somebody who's building a technology like this that's fundamentally different than anything that exists?
Well, the easiest way to think about this is this is just a kind of modernization or structurally better helicopter. So, we take off and land vertically like helicopters. The difference though is we have a wing which does allow us to get more range than what you know you might have expected for a battery operated aircraft. Because they're switched to batteries and electric engines, it enables you to put multiple electric engines onto these aircraft. And so if you have any type of issues where you lost a propeller, you lost a fuel source, you lost an engine, you have so much redundancy built into these aircrafts, you can still fly safely and ultimately certify these aircrafts at very very high levels of safety. So we're just almost like replacing what the helicopter industry did for a much more affordable, much safer and ultimately much lower noise product. So that's really the general concept.
The FAA created a new category for us. They called it powered lift. This is the first new category in many decades. So this is a new concept and they did that which was by the way supported bipartisan. It's not a political thing. Everybody in America agreed that the US does need to maintain its leadership position in aviation and we do see other countries really starting to gain traction and so the US really leaned in heavily here supporting the industry. So great support from the highest levels of government, both sides of the political system that want to make sure that we can get these aircrafts to market. So we're part of this first wave that's going through. A lot of the rules have been set. We're doing all the testing right now. And one of the important parts is you will start to see these aircrafts in the wild next year in the summer because President Trump launched an executive order and there was a program called the EIP or eVTOL Integration Pilot Program which allows us to put these aircrafts into the market. You'll see them flying around. Much of the industry will do it. It's not just an Archer thing. It's an industry thing. We'll all start flying and we'll really start to get the public used to seeing these aircrafts and start to develop the consumer confidence we need to launch these aircrafts all over the country.
Yeah, you touched on the next thing I was going to ask, which is at what point do I look outside and I see some of these? So, you're saying next summer there could be some in some key markets where you could look up into the sky and see some of these?
Yeah. So, if you go back in 2022, the FAA created this new category and they said, we're going to call this powered lift. It's not a helicopter. It's not an airplane. It's this new category powered lift. In 2022, they also set out a vision where they called it Innovate 28. The first time you would see mass use of these aircraft would be at the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics. And the reason they put that out there as an aspirational goal was they wanted to get everybody lined up around certain dates. So they wanted the regulators, the infrastructure players, the operators, the OEMs, everybody to work towards this singular goal where there's lots of aircrafts flying around in one individual city. In May of 2025, the Olympics announced that Archer would be the exclusive air taxi provider for that event. So that was a huge deal for us.
And then in June of 2026, the executive order came down from the president where they said, we are going to help create this pathway to go from just showcasing these aircrafts flying around in very conservative point-to-point routes starting without people on them, just pilots, and build our way into the scaled operations in 2028. So what you'll see now is it's estimated first quarter, so around January time frame, we'll hear the first five cities that get picked for this that'll get picked by the Department of Transportation and then the expectation is by summer we'll start flying those routes. So you can expect to see some big cities. You can expect to see probably some smaller cities. We are hopeful — we just bought an airport in Los Angeles called Hawthorne right outside of LAX and SoFi. So that is an obvious target area for us and you'll start to see some of these cities get announced and then ultimately start to operate there.
Very cool. That seems like almost a futuristic reality that's nearly here and I can't think of a better use case than getting athletes around LA when they need to be at meets and matches during the Olympics. So I think that's very cool and I know your jacket is official merch there and you have some props from the Olympics as well.
Yes, the Olympics have been great partners to us. We view ourselves as Team USA and so we're super proud to be partnered with Team USA and the entire Olympics. The goal is to move dignitaries, VIPs, athletes, and fans in and around the games. We are working on a lot of the infrastructure to get that set up. We have a lot of locations that we've been working with. So for example we have a great partnership with Kroenke Sports and Entertainment which is the Rams and SoFi Stadium in Woodland Hills. USC and the Coliseum of course, Hawthorne Airport, and so there's lots of the venues that will be used during the Olympics that will be quite important to the network that we're flying where people can go in and around the games and have a really great safe way to be transported. And of course there'll always be good merch that comes with it.
Yeah. Let's — you mentioned Hawthorne a couple times. I want to get to that because a lot of buzz about the acquisition of this airport in forums online and StockTwits. Walk us through sort of the decision-making process for this purchase. Have you guys always been sort of on the hunt for an airport? Where does it fit in the broader vision? Why this geography? Kind of tell us what you can about how this came about.
