Archer Aviation at Canaccord Genuity’s Conference: eVTOL Ambitions Soar

On Tuesday, 12 August 2025, Archer Aviation (NYSE:ACHR) showcased its strategic vision at Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference. The discussion highlighted Archer’s ambitious plans for urban air mobility, leveraging partnerships and technological advancements. While the company is making strides in aircraft development and securing significant orders, it faces challenges in regulatory approvals and infrastructure development.

Key Takeaways

• Archer Aviation has a robust order book exceeding $6 billion, including a $1.5 billion deal with United Airlines.
• The company is focused on deploying eVTOL aircraft in American cities by next year, with a key milestone set for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
• Strategic partnerships with airlines and international entities are crucial for Archer’s expansion into the defense sector and global markets.
• Noise reduction and thermal signature improvements are essential for both civil and military applications of eVTOLs.
• Archer is working closely with the FAA and other agencies to expedite regulatory approvals and integration with existing infrastructure.

Financial Results

• Archer’s order book stands at over $6 billion, with significant contributions from United Airlines, including $1 billion in firm orders and $500 million in options.
• United Airlines has made a $10 million non-refundable pre-delivery payment.
• A Launch Edition contract with Abu Dhabi Aviation is valued at tens of millions of dollars over 18 to 24 months.
• The Covington facility is targeted to produce up to 650 aircraft per year, with a near-term goal of 50 aircraft annually.

Operational Updates

• Archer is building six aircraft across two facilities, with three in final assembly.
• The company is expanding internationally with Launch Edition programs in the UAE, Indonesia, and Ethiopia.
• A partnership with ANGREL is driving Archer’s expansion into the defense sector.
• Collaborations with Atlantic Aviation and Signature Flight Support aim to develop charging infrastructure.

Future Outlook

• Archer plans to deploy aircraft in American cities by next year, scaling operations for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
• Manufacturing is ramping up, with a focus on achieving a production rate of about 50 aircraft per year.
• The company is working to secure necessary regulatory approvals and improve eVTOL technology, focusing on acoustics and thermal signatures.

Q&A Highlights

• Nikhil Goel emphasized the growing demand for urban air mobility, which is expected to surpass road capacity in the coming years.
• Archer’s aircraft are designed to be quieter than helicopters, addressing community concerns about noise.
• The partnership with Palantir is enhancing software integration for air traffic control upgrades.

In conclusion, for a deeper dive into Archer Aviation’s strategic plans and developments, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Canaccord Genuity’s 45th Annual Growth Conference:

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: All right. Hi everyone. I’m Austin Moeller, the aerospace defense analyst here at Canaccord Genuity. And today, I’m joined by Nikhil Goel of Archer Aviation. And today, so I guess just for those that are unfamiliar with the story Archer in the audience, can you talk to them a little bit about the opportunity for urban air mobility and the mid-ninety VTOL aircraft?

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yeah. No, absolutely. Well, I’ve been first of all, thanks for joining today. Nikhil Goyal, Chief Commercial Officer of Archer. I’ve been in the EVTOL industry for about ten years.

Started my career at Uber, where I helped found the Uber Elevate division, which focused on urban air mobility. At Uber, it was really formed out of the need and sort of the vision of taking a look at data across our cities. It’s very obvious that demand for movements from a to b was quickly outstripping what we believe to be the road bandwidth that we’d see in the next ten years. So I actually started a helicopter division, ran that business for several years, started working with NASA, who had invented these eVTOL vehicles over thirty years ago. And it became very obvious that urban air mobility distributed electric propulsion would form sort of the next wave of mobility.

And so started the Ureleva division back in 2016, and that’s when I met Adam Goldstein. Adam Goldstein, the founder of Archer, really sort of was able to go put together all the pieces, and more importantly, the team, and said, hey, I’m going to go approach this entire business with a commercial mindset. Do you get to market quickly? How do you bring an eVTOL to cities globally? And how do you put together the best team to do that?

So Tom Muniz, our founding CTO, he started building aircraft fifteen years ago with Larry Page and has basically, since that point, built a new EVTOL aircraft every eighteen months, including the Archer Midnight aircraft that we are building today. And so that was sort of the foundation of the company. Fast forward to today, we’ve raised about $3,300,000,000 to date. We’re publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, of course. And we are on track to start.

We’ve already started to deploy aircraft to The UAE this year. We’re on track to start deploying aircraft in American cities as soon as next year. And our sort of goal, our North Star here in The US, is to get aircraft to scale by the time of the Los Angeles Olympics. We’re the official partner of the games. We were chosen for the exclusive partnership to deploy air taxis at the LA Olympics.

And so that’s kind of our North Star here domestically in The US.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: What can you tell the audience about the performance of the Midnight relative to DePiers and the 12 tilt six rotor design?

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yeah. So Tom Muniz, who I was talking about, our founding CTO, I’ll rewind a little bit. So he started building aircraft with Larry Page about fifteen years ago. Larry had this crazy idea that looking at the power cost curve of batteries, you could actually use batteries to power electric flight in and around our cities. And he recruited Tom out of the Stanford PhD program to go build those aircraft.

He built five generations of aircraft with Larry, and through that process learned a lot not just about the performance of these vehicles, but also how you certify the vehicles with the FAA. And so he helped sell that business to Boeing. It became a company called Whisk. And then as I mentioned, he joined Adam to go build Archer. He had the advantage of being able to look around corners and say, not only how do you build the most efficient aircraft, but how do you build one that’s built for certification and to get to market quickly.

So there are a few aspects to it. One is just looking at the business case. There are a lot of trade offs when you build these aircraft around range, speed, and payload. And this is where some of the experience from Uber also helped with it. As you looked at cities, the use case you’re trying to solve for is the 20 to 50 mile trip.

And to be economically viable on those trips, you need to be able to carry a pilot plus four passengers plus luggage, and do that at a speed of roughly 150 miles an hour. And so that’s how you form the basis for the aircraft. And Tom, with his experience, looked at those mission specifications and said, okay, well, first of all, you need to be significantly quieter than a helicopter. That’s what allows you to blend into these cities. You need to be significantly safer than a helicopter.

You can’t have any single fault parts. So you have to have forward redundancy across the aircraft. You have to have a wing. And then you have to be able to be all electric from day one. What the math gets you to is a design that looks a little bit like an airplane, so it’s got a wing like a plane.

But then instead of one large rotor like a helicopter, you have a dozen electric propellers, six on the back, six in the front. All 12 of those are used to lift the aircraft vertically on takeoff, and then the six in the front tilt forward and allow you to fly on the wing. And so that was the design that we settled on. I think a lot of the industry has settled on similar designs as well, And that allows us to hit all the mission criteria I talked about. Again, a 100 miles, a thousand pounds payload, about a 150 miles an hour.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Yeah, it definitely seems like the industry has largely decided on the tilt rotor. Yeah. So could you detail what the passenger experience on the midnight would be like from a cabin space to getting on board, embarking, disembarking, and what kind of luggage that someone could bring with them?

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yeah. Well, zoom out. Again, the goal is 20 to 50 mile trips. It’s not super, super short trips. It’s also not long trips that are going to be more economically efficient in an airplane.

It’s kind of the in between. So think JFK to Manhattan. Let’s imagine that you’re taking a United Airlines flight from LA to Newark. You take the flight. Let’s say you’re in business class and you land.

The way that that experience would look is it would be integrated in with United. So assuming you’re flying business or you’re a loyal passenger, you either purchase the add on or maybe they give it to you for free. You land in Newark. You get onto the Archer Midnight aircraft. You’re one of four passengers on that aircraft.

You take a six to eight minute flight into the city. You land on West Thirtieth Helipad. When you land, there’s a car waiting for you there to take you to your final destination, and you’ve done a trip that could have taken you an hour to an hour and a half by car. You’ve done that full end to end journey to your house or your hotel in about half an hour or less. So that’s roughly what the journey will look like.

We’ll have enough luggage space for each passenger to be able to bring a small carry on. If you’ve got more than that, either you buy another seat or it would arrive separately for you.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Can we talk about the launch addition agreement that you have with, I think three different countries now. Yeah. And, can you talk about the the revenue opportunity per aircraft or how many aircraft you might deliver and the revenue you could generate per aircraft to provide to countries to be able to evaluate and test urban air mobility routes in advance of certification?

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yep. Let me provide a bit of a broader picture around our business model, and then I’ll get into some of the launch edition stuff as well. So our model is to sell airplanes first and foremost. So we’ve got an over $6,000,000,000 order book that we’ve announced. We’re in the lucky position to work with six of the top airlines in the world.

Domestically, we’ve got a $1,500,000,000 order with United. So it’s a billion firm plus 500,000,000 options. We have a partnership with Southwest. Internationally, we work with airlines like Indigo. It’s the third largest airline in the world, market leader in India.

Japan Airlines, we’ve announced national partnerships with places like Korea and The UAE as well. And so we’ve got a large order book. Many of those come with substantial predelivery payments. So United, as an example, has put down a $10,000,000 nonrefundable predelivery payment as part of their deal with us. And so we have similar constructs with other airlines as well.

So that’s sort of the long term business. It’s against selling aircraft, which we think is very economically advantageous for us. As part of that, some of the early aircraft that we’ve built, we have found an opportunity to deploy ahead of certification in international markets. So I’ll talk about some of those. Overall, those are with so far, what we’ve announced is UAE, Indonesia, and Ethiopia.

But the way that these contracts look, first of all, is with The UAE. So The UAE, we’ve got a very broad national partnership. Mubadala is an investor. IHC is an investor that’s an international holding company. It’s the largest listed entity in The Middle East.

We’ve got some other sovereign sources of capital as well. And what we’ve done is we formed a multiyear agreement with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office because The UAE broadly as a country is very leaned into the technology, and they want to be one of the first in the world to deploy it. So what they’ve done is they’ve partnered with us. We have agreed to make Abu Dhabi our launch market. Earlier this summer, we deployed our first aircraft there.

So we delivered our first aircraft to Abu Dhabi and started flying it in July under what we call launch edition. So what that means is it is a contract with the operator. In this case, it’s an operator called Abu Dhabi Aviation. It’s the largest helicopter operator in The Middle East. That contract is for tens of millions of dollars over the next eighteen to twenty four months, under which we will deploy a small handful of aircraft, and we’ll start flying that within the country.

An important piece of that is the regulatory involvement, because obviously you need the partnership with the regulator to do it. So the federal regulator, their equivalent of the FAA is called the GCAA, the General Civil Aviation Authority. And what we’ve done with them is we’ve created a partnership for them to take the existing FAA rule set and create a pathway for us to deploy aircraft in The UAE ahead of other places in the world. And so that’s, like, very advantageous to us. It gives us an opportunity to deploy aircraft early, and it puts us in place where we expect payments coming from that agreement in the second half of this year.

So it’s a it’s a place that we feel like we’re lucky to be, And what we’ll do is we’ll take that blueprint, and we’ll replicate it in other countries. Again, Ethiopia and Indonesia are the two we’ve announced. Ethiopia is home to one of the largest airlines in the world. Ethiopian Airlines, it’s one of the biggest star alliance partners of United. And then Indonesia, think places like Bali or Jakarta, big, big mega cities with lots of congestion.

There’s roughly a dozen other countries that are interested to an equal degree, and we’ll talk more about those in the months ahead.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: If we just pivot over to defense for a moment, can you talk to us about the genesis of your partnership with Andro on a hybrid VTOL drone and what we should expect in terms of timing on the DOD’s potential program selection or flight test campaign for that aircraft. I know you can’t talk about the specifics of the program, but maybe just a little bit

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: more detail. Yeah. So look, last year we announced a partnership with ANGREL to build defense aircraft. And that’s been really exciting for us. A lot of the conversations we have globally are not just about civil use cases, but defense use cases as well.

One of the things that’s become very clear as we talk to our customers, both sort of America and our allies, is that our first instinct, which is, hey, maybe you put a turbo generator on an existing civil EV toll, midnight in our case, turns out that that would not be satisfactory to most of our customers. It gets you more range, it doesn’t quite hit on the other capabilities that our customers demanded. Being very clear, you had to create a purpose built vehicle for the defense applications. And so as we looked at that, we said, hey, let’s go work with a partner to build the right aircraft for those missions. We haven’t shared much more beyond that.

What I can share is that one is we’re seeing that demand grow globally. Two is we’ve made a few moves accelerate our progress there. So recently, we announced two acquisitions we made in the space. One was for a company called MCC, Mission Critical Composites. They’re based out of Southern California.

It allows us to iterate and prototype much more quickly as we think about what the next defense aircraft looks like. And then the second was a patent portfolio and critical talent from a company called OverAir, which is a spin off from Karim. That was founded by Abe Karim, the inventor of the Predator drone. So both of those put us in a great spot on the defense side of things, and we’ll share more in the coming months.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Exciting. So you have a fleet of eight aircraft right now, including the six that are under construction. How many of those might be used for FAA TIA testing with type conforming components versus those that you might deliver to launch edition customers?

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yeah. So what we announced yesterday on our earnings call is that we’re currently building six aircraft. So we’ve got two manufacturing facilities. We’ve got our Golden Line in Silicon Valley. That’s located right next to our engineering headquarters.

Think of that as like our pilot line. That’s where we put build, manufacturing, QA, flight testing all sort of in one spot until we get the new product introduction just right. Our large volume manufacturing facility is just outside of Atlanta in a city called Covington. It’s one of the largest aviation facilities in the space, and that is intended to be able to produce up to six fifty aircraft a year. So at a macro scale, what you’ll see us do is complete the new product introduction phase in Silicon Valley, move that blueprint over to Georgia, and then start to crank up the manufacturing out the Georgia facility.

The near term rate goal there is about 50 per year. So that’s kind of the macro process we’re in. Across those facilities today, we’ve got six aircraft in various builds of production. Three of them are in final assembly. And so some of those, to Austin’s point, some of those will go internationally as part of the Launch Edition program.

Some of those will stay domestically, mostly in Silicon Valley, towards certification in the flight testing. We also have an opportunity to deploy aircraft in American cities as soon as next year. So two of the exciting things that have happened, one is we were selected for the as I mentioned earlier, we were selected for the exclusive air taxi partnership as the official air taxi partner of the LA Olympics in 2028. This goes back to two years ago, the FAA published a paper called Innovate ’28. And in that, they laid out the vision that these eVTOL aircraft need to be certified and at meaningful scale by 2028 to serve the LA Olympics.

So think about it, like next thousand days in Los Angeles, we need to get to a point where we are certified and at scale. So that puts the North Star bookend in place. That’s been really exciting for us for a few reasons. Just last week, President Trump put in place an executive order commissioning a White House counsel to oversee all security and transportation for the games. So that puts real federal oversight around what we’re doing and real excitement around what we’re doing.

At a local level, we’ve seen our existing real estate partners, like SoFi Stadium and USC, as well as new real estate groups come to us and say, hey, we want to build vertiports to be a part of that puzzle. So that puts a really great north star on it, and it kind of unifies both local and federal governments. But then in the near term, we partnered with the US DOT, the FAA, the White House to issue another executive order back in June. This was the executive order on American dominance in the eVTOL industry. And what that did was it put in place what they called the eVTOL integration pilot program.

That set out a series of steps for us to deploy aircraft in The US as soon as next year. And so that’s been really exciting. It’s caused the FAA to really put things into hyperdrive and create a pathway for us to do that. And so think of those as the the two bookends and what you can expect to see here domestically, and it’s part of the the reason why we’ve been able to ramp up manufacturing.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: And if I recall the EIPPV, V2L Integration Pilot Program, it’s supposed to select aircraft within the next ninety days. Yeah. And then the performance period on that is essentially three years, right?

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yeah. I don’t remember the exact specifics, but it’s aimed to be very, very near term. You know, this administration has been more supportive than any I’ve I’ve sort of seen, at least in my lifetime. They’re very, very leaned in and and are excited around American leadership here, which means kind of two things. One is fostering all the American talent and capital to create the industry here.

And then two is to globally export those aircraft all over the world.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: So can you talk about the challenges at airports? Because I’ve been to Adam’s office and I’ve seen his his, essentially, diagram of all the different airports

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yeah.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Where you could put aircraft. But can you talk about the challenges of securing parking spots and runway aprons and taxi areas for operating fleets of EV tolls at airports and why it’s so important to have that first mover advantage?

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yeah. Well, actually, most airports have been very cooperative and excited about this. Helps alleviate the need for Ubers and taxis and parking at the facility, which I think is great. I’ll say a few things. One is remember we work with two of the big airlines here, so both United and Southwest, which together operate at hundreds of airports across the country.

Two is we’ve announced partnerships at a bunch of these airports, particularly in New York, LA, and San Francisco Bay Area. So in all of those places, we’re doing some really cool things. In fact, I think I just saw this this morning. I think two years ago, Houston, which is a big United hub, put out architectural diagrams for how they’re redesigning one of the terminals to put EV tall landing spots on top of the terminal. So it’s a really innovative use of the real estate in the space.

But there’s sort of two ways to think about it. There’s the short term. So the short term, all these big airports have FBOs. We have partnerships with both Atlantic and Signature, as well as the long tail of other FBO providers. So in the near term, what you’ll definitely be able to easily do is land in an airport, drive three minutes to the FBO nearby, and then go take off and land from there.

In the long term, our vision is how do integrate the passenger experience more tightly? So as I talked about earlier, maybe you get off your flight, and before you even get into the terminal, you are on your Archer EV toll on your way to the city. So that’s more of the long term vision. We’re working towards that as well. But, you know, to sum it up, we have a, I think, very favorable relationship with some of the top airports in the country.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Excellent. So can you you’ve touched on FBOs just briefly there, but can you discuss your partnership with Atlantic Aviation on preparing those lounges and vertiport sites for Archer operating there? Yeah. And what key markets you’re targeting to roll out lounges and facilities in, at least initially?

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yep. The three domestically that we’ve talked about publicly are New York, San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles. And so the partnership with Atlantic, similar to the partnership we have with Signature, those are the two big market leaders, pretty similar. There’s a few things included in there. The big one is charging.

So how do you make sure that by the time we’re ready to operate out of those facilities, you have electric chargers in place? This is where our partnership with Beta Technologies comes into play as well. We’ve aligned most of the industry around the combined charging standard, CCS. And what we’re doing is we’re working with Atlantic in Unison and Signature to install chargers at those key facilities. Some of those have already started to take place.

I don’t remember the exact ones, but I’ll give you an example. You know, one that’s really exciting is like Santa Monica. It’s in a really prime area of LA. It’s somewhere where we could start deploying chargers sooner rather than later. And again, as we think about the Olympics, it’ll be a key piece of real estate where you’ll want to operate in and out of.

And today, a lot of those FBOs are underutilized. So it’s a good partnership for us, and it’s a good partnership for the FBO providers as well.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: If we think about both the passenger and military applications of eVTOLs, how important is the acoustic and thermal signature of these aircraft, either with eVTOL or hybrid VTOL, to those different use cases.

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yep. I’ll talk about both of them, but punch line is very important to both. On the civil side, if you ask yourself, well why don’t we fly around in helicopters today? The simple answer is noise. There’s thousands of helicopters that exist across The US.

In places like LA, there’s over 200 helipads. Barely any of them are used. The reason is because any time someone tries fly into any of the helipads, the neighbors are all they all go to City Hall and complain about them. In San Francisco, there’s 32 helipads. Only two of them are used, and those are at the hospitals.

Even when you fly in to save someone’s life, you still get thousands of complaints at City Hall the next morning. That’s how much people absolutely abhor the noise around helicopters. And so the big game changer with these vehicles is they’re 100 times quieter when they’re in cruise, and they’re significantly quieter on takeoff. And so you can be a lot less disruptive to your community. That’s really the big breakthrough with the aircraft.

I would say outside of that, if that weren’t true, would be very difficult for this industry to take off. And so that’s the big step change that you get is the noise signature on the civil side. On the defense side, very, very similar. Today, in vertical lift, the incumbent is like this 1960s and ’70s technologies of the Chinook and the Blackhawk. And those are very loud, and they also have big thermal signatures.

So from a stealth perspective, as we think about future conflicts, they’re not very effective. And so that’s where we’ve talked about these new aircraft that we’re making being hybrid electric. So when you’re over water or mowed areas, you can use heavy fuels to get more range. But then when you’re closer to sort of contested areas, you can be all electric.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Can you talk about your thoughts on the FAA’s industry day about upgrading the air traffic control network, the $12,500,000,000 in funding that was provided for ATC upgrades in the big beautiful bill, and how we can improve automation in flight ops centers and aircraft control towers.

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Yeah, I think it’s a big opportunity. It’s huge for the industry. First of all, it’s emblematic of just how leaned in the FAA is. As I said, there have been a bunch of executive orders that we’ve seen from the White House around aviation. I mean, supersonic flight, upgrading ATC, etcetera, etcetera.

And so they’re very, very leaned in. ATC is a part of that. Two is today there’s 45,000 flights per day, give or take, that are governed by ATC. Already, I think the system is struggling to keep up with it. If us and our peers do our job right, I think in the next five years, it’s going to be an order of magnitude more movements, particularly in low altitude airspace between EV tolls and drones, etcetera.

And so the current administration has taken a good hard look at it and saying, how do we upgrade those facilities to make sure that they are modern and can support that level of increased activity? On the Archer side, we announced a partnership with Palantir. We haven’t said too much about the work we’re doing. We’re doing a lot of really great work together. That is focused around AI and how we can sort of build upgrades to the software integration of these systems.

So expect to hear more from us, but just at a macro national level, it’s a very good thing.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Well, that’s very exciting, so we’ll stay tuned on that. I think we’re at the end of our time, but thank you so much, Nikhil, for coming and talking to us about Archer Aviation today.

Nikhil Goel, Chief Commercial Officer, Archer Aviation: Thanks for having me. Yep.

Austin Moeller, Aerospace Defense Analyst, Canaccord Genuity: Thanks so much.

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