Blade Air Mobility at Ladenburg Thalmann EXPO25: Strategic Growth and Innovation

On Wednesday, 21 May 2025, Blade Air Mobility (NASDAQ:BLDE) presented at the Ladenburg Thalmann Innovation EXPO25, highlighting its strategic initiatives and future outlook. The company, known for its asset-light model and strategic infrastructure, discussed its transition to electric vertical aircraft (eVTOL) and the expansion of its medical transportation business. While Blade is set to capitalize on these opportunities, challenges remain in the gradual adoption of new technologies.

Key Takeaways

• Blade’s medical transportation business surpasses its passenger business, generating $150 million.
• The company anticipates eVTOL commercialization in the Middle East by late 2026/early 2027.
• Blade is financially ahead of schedule, with expected profitability sooner than projected.
• The company holds a 30-35% market share in U.S. organ transportation.
• Blade plans strategic acquisitions in the medical sector to enhance service offerings.

Financial Results

• Blade’s medical transportation business, now larger than its passenger segment, is expected to grow with double-digit revenue increases.
• Medical sector margins currently stand at 15%, with a target to reach the high teens.
• The company has $120 million in cash and zero debt, positioning it strongly for future growth.
• Adjusted EBITDA was just over $1 million last year, with projections exceeding $10 million for 2025.

Operational Updates

• Blade is the largest air transporter of human organs in the U.S., with a 30-35% market share.
• It partners with over 70 hospitals and owns jets fulfilling 30% of medical missions.
• Recent contracts in the medical sector indicate ongoing expansion.
• Blade is leveraging its infrastructure for critical cargo opportunities, including AOG parts and radio pharmaceuticals.
• The company supports major events like the Ryder Cup and Monaco races with dedicated heliports.

Future Outlook

• Blade plans to commercialize eVTOL aircraft in the Middle East by late 2026/early 2027 and in the U.S. by late 2027/early 2028.
• A transitional phase will see helicopters and eVTOL coexisting, with helicopters handling larger loads and longer distances.
• Blade is exploring strategic acquisitions in the medical sector to enhance its offerings and leverage hospital relationships.

Q&A Highlights

• The company is focused on safety, maintaining a strong safety record with current helicopter operations.
• Blade collaborates with Bell in the U.S. and Airbus in Europe for equipment, not producing its own.
• The company does not engage in tourism helicopter operations.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed account of Blade Air Mobility’s strategic plans and insights shared at the conference.

Full transcript - Ladenburg Thalmann Innovation EXPO25:

Operator: Here in New York. So he had a really long commute. And, anyway, and then we invite, I’ll ask a couple questions to get started, and we’d really appreciate your participation with the questions that you might have. With that, Rob?

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Great. Thanks for having me. So we’ll give a little quick just a brief overview of the company, you know, how we started. We’re now into our eleventh year of Blade. We started Blade from whole cloth here in New York and flying passengers by helicopter on leisure routes and eventually expand into airports such as JFK, Newark, and then moved into Europe where we’re flying between Monaco, Nice Cannes, Saint Tropez in the winter, The Alps, Geneva, Courchevel, other areas.

And the thesis of the company was very simple, which was how do we best transition consumers and commuters from helicopters to electric vertical aircraft or what you may call EVTOL in the future? And what kind of platform would that look like? And what we did was, you know, we developed and acquired captive infrastructure here in Manhattan at all three heliports, infrastructure at Newark Airport, infrastructure at Nice International Airport in two terminals, Infrastructure in the most two most important markets in the world, are the Greater New York area and Southern Europe because in short distance aviation, specifically in helicopters, we do not have a lot of landing zones. And what’s interesting about, you know, our model in terms of facilitating that transition is that we’re asset light, which allows us to have an asset swap at some point in the future. But those new aircraft will be a huge unlock for us because they’re quiet and they’re emission free.

And with that, communities and stakeholders will be much more comfortable about having landing zones. Because right now, if you guys are in New York, some of you may live in New York, you’ll notice that all of the heliports are on the water or away from residential areas, with the exception of our largest terminal, which is on the West Side in Hudson Yards. But back in the day, Hudson Yards was literally just warehouses and the Lincoln Tunnel. And eventually, the Hudson Yards development was built towards the heliport, and a park was actually built around it. And now it actually is kind of like city 2 if you think about it, because people could take buses, the seven train, walk across the street and get a helicopter and be in JFK in five minutes for the price of an Uber.

We do this on an asset light basis. We do not own any of our aircraft. We can track with a number of operators that are vetted for safety by our pretty large safety team, financial wherewithal. They have to use our technology. They have non competes.

And we’re basically better positioned, I think, than any other company to take advantage of this transition to next generation electric aircraft. At the same time, what we did was find other use cases, specifically medical. We are now the largest air transporter of human organs in The United States, heart, livers, and lungs. And that business today is a $150,000,000 business, actually even larger than our passenger business, quite profitable. Over 70 hospitals we work with, we’re improving outcomes every day and making it much more affordable for hospitals to move organs in order to really help save lives.

It’s a terrific business located here in The United States, and that is on jets, helicopters, and we call lights and sirens SUVs. And that’s a business that we’ve grown from literally from zero, as I said, to $150,000,000 And from 2,005, I think we had about we made an acquisition of a company called Trinier Medical, got us to 25,000,000. This year, we’re about 150,000,000 on that. So it’s been a terrific acquisition for us. So that’s kind of just a quick overview.

We’re based here in New York and in Europe.

Operator: So that leads me into my first question to get this going. Rob mentioned these electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles to replace helicopters as we know them today. And it’s looking more and more like these vehicles are going to arrive in the not too distant future, the maybe even the end of this year in overseas and next year here in The US. And I’d like Rob to talk a little bit about when they might arrive and how he makes the transition from electric from, you know, our standard helicopter to the electric vehicles.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Sure. I mean, obviously, to get the best sense of when these aircraft are gonna be commercialized, you have to ask the manufacturers themselves. But that being said, we do have great relationships with the manufacturers. I think right now, it feels like q four twenty five, q ’1 ’20 ’6 for The Middle East for two of the manufacturers.

Operator: Did you mention

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Adobe and I believe Archer. And and then I think you’ll probably seeing them either very late twenty seven or ’28. And again, you know, there’s gonna be a cohabitation phase. These aircraft only go about 30 miles for the most part, and so I think you’re kind of gonna have this kind of cohabitation where you have helicopters probably for larger loads in terms of weight, number of passengers, longer distances, but then clearly VTOL for short missions like what we do today for the airport, which frankly, with 28,000,000 people going by private cars between all the airports in New York City and Manhattan, It’s a huge addressable market that we’re really, you know, excited about, especially since we kind of, you know, broke through the Uber Black barrier with a hundred $95 pricing on conventional helicopters today and actually $95 for people to purchase a $695 airport pass so they can fly all year for $95. But so I think that’s the kind of timeline we’re looking at.

But in terms of what we bring to it, why we can facilitate this, because we believe we have the entire ecosystem for this. You know, from captive infrastructure, all the heliports now in New York in the New York area. We have Southern Europe, which is the second largest market in the world. We have a consumer to copy technology stack that not only allows that, you know, people to book, but to have that connection directly to our operations center, to our operators, to our flyer relations people. So all of the sausage making that hopefully our passengers don’t see is happening behind the scenes and there’s redundancy.

As you can imagine in aviation and logistics in general, it’s all about redundancies because things do go wrong in terms of, you know, you could have everything from delays, weather, all sorts of things, mechanical issues, and we have to make sure that we’re there for our customers and get these things right. So we talked about infrastructure, technology stack, and then just being in the best routes in the world. Until there’s new infrastructure, it’s all about Greater New York. You’ve heard about this from all the eVTOL manufacturers in Southern Europe. And then it’s the brands, you know, we’re the most recognized recognized, excuse me, we’re the most recognized brands in vertical transportation today.

And because we’re asset light, it’s really just an asset swap for us, where we can facilitate our operators for getting this new next generation of aircraft because we supply so many hours to them, and we’re the largest part of their business. So we know that we can both accelerate and derisk the go to market strategies for eVTOL manufacturers.

Operator: Go ahead. Couple of questions. Considering all the actions we’ve had recently in helicopter travel, do you have any plans with battery operated?

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: I’m sorry. What?

Operator: Battery operated helicopters.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: We’ve been talking about electric vertical aircraft.

Operator: Also, with AI incorporated.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Well, you know, think Second question.

Operator: Yeah. From a safety issue.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Okay. So there’s one there’s one incident with respect to fatalities for every hundred and seventy thousand hours of part one thirty five charter and a to b flight like we do. So it’s in it’s incredibly safe in terms of helicopters. Obviously, what happened with this tourism helicopter, we’re not in the tourism business, was, you know, catastrophic. Going back, the last time there was an incident that had to do with the kind of work that we do, which is charter and moving people A to B, is 1990.

So we’re now looking at thirty five years ago. So it is quite safe. I think as eVTOL gets commercialized and moves into new generations of aircraft, I think, you know, off off the top, I think because of fewer moving parts, redundancies, I think, you know, they’ll they’ll be very they’ll be quite safe. Everyone’s aiming for as close to commercial aircraft, which is the safest form of travel. In terms of AI, what I would really say is, you know, it’s clear that while autonomous is not you know, we don’t see that in the immediate future, I think you will see kind of virtual second pilots that kind of can aid with everything from instrumentation, airspace, collision avoidance, best practices.

There’s no question that the technology is is gonna make things, you know, safer as we as we move forward.

Operator: Do you produce your own equipment?

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: No. Do not. We do not. We work with know, we’re you know, our equipment is both from Bell, which is made by owned by Textron here in The US, and our airframes in Europe are made by Airbus. Go

Operator: ahead. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the next generation aircraft? So maybe a little bit more on that, but then also timing. Like, how should we

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: think about timing of when we should start to see some of those new aircraft come out? Well, think we did we significant difference. I think we just said, you know, looking at Middle East, Late 20 6 again, this is coming from the manufacturers, early twenty seven, and then probably late twenty seven, early ’20 ’8 for The US. But probably, you know, I don’t want to say it’s going be performative, but they’ll just start being working into the ecosystem. They’ll be you’ll probably be seeing a lot more helicopters still than you will be seeing eVTOL.

It’s not going be like a light switch.

Operator: I happen to live in Utah, and Utah is gearing up for the two thousand and thirty two Olympics, the Winter Olympics. And the city or the county and city are already trying to make plans for an urban air facilities for the Olympics. So there I mean, government officials are starting to look at this. My next question is, you mentioned brand image and brand recognition. I know you’re going to do the golf UF Soap and Golf Tournament.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: We’re doing the Ryder Cup.

Operator: The Ryder Cup, that’s So can you talk a little bit more about I mean, if you’re outside the greater New York area, how how do people find out about you or how do what do you think your perception is out there?

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: As I said, I think, you know, by far, the most recognized brand in what I call vertical transportation today, you know, as evidenced by the Ryder, you know, Ryder Cup, you know, seeking us out where, you know, this is probably the most important golf event in the world that happens every two years. For those of you who know golf, we’ll have eight helipads in Bethpage. We’ll be we’ll be flying passengers who are guests at the Ryder Cup over the week from Manhattan to Bethpage, you know, across eight helipads. In Monaco, our the heliport and our terminal are literally trackside. And as you could probably imagine, when Monaco becomes this weekend a racetrack, you can’t really drive.

So people will literally, you know, fly from Nice and land in, you know, Monaco. We’ll be doing it probably every fifteen, twenty minutes. You know, in the past, it’s probably the largest military movement of people by helicopter in the world during those three days for qualifying practice and race day. So it’s something we’re really excited about. So we do a lot of events, and I think it’s important because, generally, those are first time flyers, and you get to see what a great use case, you know, turning, you know, literally, call it three and a half hours that can be on race day from Nice Airport to Monaco into kind of five minute flights, get getting people used to the you know, what urban air mobility is all about.

So, you know, I think that it’s in the cities we are, but we also do kind of pop up in areas. You know, we’ve done music festivals in the past. Done other types of big events. Yeah. Taylor Swift, others.

Fly to a lot of concerts, that’s for sure. And it’s great. It’s great, you know, because that’s how you get people to start thinking about use cases. If you just think about UBS Stadium where I think we did a Stevie Nicks concert. Right?

You know, we have an ability to actually move UBS Stadium from Long Island to Manhattan. How does that happen? Well, you know, in Manhattan when you go to Mass Square Garden, maybe you can walk fifteen minutes, but if you’re going to UBS Stadium, your concert’s at 07:00, you are fighting traffic across the Long Island, the Midtown Tunnel, wherever you’re going, as opposed to flying for five minutes right outside UBS. So if you’re, you know, a UBS Stadium or you’re a a sponsor or you have a box, what a great way to get your guests there. And also, when you’re making your decision of where you’re seeing whatever show, UBS becomes much more competitive.

So that’s, you know, another good example.

Operator: Okay. I wanna switch gears to the medical side.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Sure.

Operator: Last so you’ve landed, I think, three new contracts in the last, like, six, nine months or so. And you’re talking about a ramp going forward in that side again. Could you elaborate on that?

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Sure. And for this year, we’re expecting revenue growth in the double digits. We have about 15% margins now. Our target is high teens on that, and I think, you know, we’re gonna see margin expansion because, you know, unlike the passenger business, we actually own a fair amount of jets. About 30% of our missions are done on blade owned jets, and those have higher margins.

And as we move more towards our own fleet, and the reason why we own them there as opposed to passenger is because we’re flying them twenty four seven, three hundred 60 five days a year, and in medical, you need a lot more control over it in terms of how, you know, these aircraft are positioned, and in fact we’re positioning them in hospitals, which does two things. Number one, it creates a competitive moat in terms of our competition because our jets are at the hospital as opposed to calling someone else who has to fly a jet in, and also creates better outcomes for patients because the jet can be scrambled immediately. Additionally, because of perfusion technology, which allows organs to live out of the body longer, the missions that we started with were really just, you know, lights and sirens, SUVs, and helicopters, and now we’ve done missions from Maine to Alaska. And the regulatory environment changed also where the radius of where you can move in Oregon was very small just four years ago, and now that’s increased. So the combination of that, the perfusion technologies, so you’re seeing longer, you know, flight distances, and that also enhances, you know, your cash flow growth as well.

Operator: And you said you’re the largest provider

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Air transporter of human organs.

Operator: Do you know what percentage of the market you own?

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: You know, I think when you look at the overall market, you know, I think it’s a lot of mom and pops. So I think we’re about 30, you know, 35% at this point, so there’s a lot of runway there. And because again, we’re competing with kind of very small companies. In addition to that, we have a lot of ancillary businesses, some that we’ve started, some that we’re building, you know, trying to leverage these great relationships that we have with hospitals. We have an organ matching service, where we have clinicians that help hospitals determine whether or not there’s a match for an organ.

We are actively looking at organ recovery, which makes the whole process of obtaining an organ much more efficient. And then also, since we have so many aircraft in standby, there are a lot of things that we call critical cargo that have to move quickly. Things like, you know, airport that’s an aircraft that’s stuck on the ground, which they call AOG, or, radio pharma, where, you know, there’s a small, half life of, you know, certain types of, pharmaceuticals that need to get somewhere really, really quickly. So leveraging our infrastructure logistics and aircraft for these critical cargo is a great growth opportunity for us.

Operator: So could we expect acquisitions in the future on the medical Yeah.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Mean, right now, we’ve got a hundred $20,000,000 of cash on our balance sheet, no zero debt, and, you know, our focus is on the medical side. You know, our great unlock and exponential growth on the passengers are gonna come from Evital. On the medical side, it’s doing what we do better than anybody else, but also acquiring companies that can kind of be, let’s say, snapped on, and you leverage our relationships with the hospitals and our infrastructure and our skill in logistics. We’re looking at acquisitions that are single digit multiples, EBITDA accretive day one, and most importantly, easily integrated. That’s what our model is for doing that, and we see a lot of great stuff.

Operator: Target rich environment?

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: You know, it’s it’s interesting. It’s it’s There is a lot out there, but some of these are smaller companies. And smaller companies, do the kind of work that you need to do on a diligence side, get comfortable with the numbers, comfortable with management teams, make sure that the right people are gonna stay around when you buy them, It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it, and the valuations will be fair. I think what what’s really interesting is when you get some of these companies, they have hospital relationships that we don’t have, that we can leverage with our air transport, and we have hospital relationships they don’t have, where they can, you know, leverage, say, their organ recovery business, or their, you know, business of moving, you know, radioisotopes, whatever it may be. So I think it’s, you know, there’s definitely, you know, it’s not only going in at a single digit multiple on the acquisition, it’s buying that multiple down by what you can bring to the acquisition.

Operator: So there’s about a minute and a half left. Any questions from okay. I’d just like to point out one thing then. Financially, the company’s, I’d say, what, a year, year and a half, maybe even two years ahead of their original projections for profitability. Some of that’s come from the medical side, which has been a really nice surprise over the last couple of years.

And some of it is proven in the passenger side. Yeah.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: We’re we’re actually one year ahead of where we thought we would be in terms of achieving profitability yearly. Yeah. Passenger.

Operator: If you look at the financials, they last year, the bottom line adjusted EBITDA was just over $1,000,000 I think analysts like myself are projecting somewhere over $10,000,000 for 2025. So it’s a pretty impressive growth rate. And I think it’s worth all of your attention. Anything else you’d like

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: to No. Thanks for the time. It’s always a pleasure.

Operator: Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Thanks a lot.

Operator: Thanks for coming, always.

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