Blade Air Mobility at Oppenheimer Conference: Strategic Shift to Medical Logistics

On Monday, 11 August 2025, Blade Air Mobility (NASDAQ:BLDE) presented its strategic shift at the Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference. The company announced its divestiture from the passenger business to focus on its rapidly growing medical and logistics segment. While this move aligns with Blade’s growth strategy, it also highlights the challenges of transitioning to a pure-play medical logistics provider.

Key Takeaways

• Blade divested its passenger business to Joby Aviation for up to $125 million, focusing on medical logistics.
• The medical segment grew 18% in the latest quarter, representing 85% of adjusted EBITDA in 2024.
• Blade aims for double-digit adjusted EBITDA growth for 2025 and a high-teens margin in the medium term.
• The company maintains a 100% contract renewal rate over the last year.
• Blade plans strategic capital deployment to enhance aircraft operations and expand ancillary services.

Financial Results

• Blade expects double-digit adjusted EBITDA growth for 2025, driven by market expansion and contract escalators.
• The medical and logistics business showed 18% growth in the most recent quarter.
• The company targets a high-teens adjusted EBITDA margin in the medium term.

Operational Updates

• Blade divested its passenger business to Joby Aviation, receiving $90 million upfront and $35 million subject to holdbacks.
• Blade operates the largest network of aircraft in the U.S., available on two hours’ notice for organ transportation.
• Investments include 50 lights and sirens SUVs for ground transportation and the Trinity Organ Placement Services.
• The company uses a hybrid asset ownership model, with one-third of flights on owned aircraft.

Future Outlook

• Blade anticipates 15% growth for the rest of the year, focusing on time-critical logistics within and outside healthcare.
• Capital deployment will focus on internalizing aircraft operations and acquiring smaller logistics providers.
• Technological advancements and regulatory changes are expected to drive growth in organ transportation.

Q&A Highlights

• The divestiture is expected to be neutral to adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow.
• Blade’s competitive advantages include flexibility in aircraft type and cost-competitive pricing.
• The divestiture will not affect the utilization of jet aircraft in the medical business.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of Blade’s strategic plans and financial outlook.

Full transcript - Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference:

Suraj Kalia, Senior Analyst, Oppenheimer: Good afternoon, everyone. Suraj Kalia, senior analyst at Oppenheimer. Pleased to have all of you join us this afternoon. With us for this slot, we have Will Hayburn, CFO of Blade Mobility. As I’m sure a number of you with interest in TransMedics and some of the other players in the in the field know that Blade is gonna be splitting up into into two companies.

I won’t take I won’t steal Will’s thunder. Will, really glad to have you here this afternoon. I’ll let you take the floor. I’ll be off camera, and I’ll resurface with some q and a towards Dan.

Will Hayburn, CFO, Blade Mobility: Great. Well, thanks, Suraj. Thanks for the intro, and and thanks for having me here. For everyone listening in, appreciate your interest in Blade. And maybe I’ll start with what Suraj just mentioned, which was an exciting transaction that we just announced last week where Blade will be divesting its passenger business to Joby Aviation for up to a 125,000,000 in proceeds.

And this really exciting because it leaves us as a pure play contractual medical and logistics business. And this has been our fastest growing business. It grew about 18% in the most recent quarter. It’s also our more profitable business, represented about 85% of the segment adjusted EBITDA in 2024, and it allows us to just stay laser focused on what we view as an incredibly attractive marketplace where we are uniquely situated to take advantage of all the technological change and underlying growth that’s that’s fueling this industry and and ultimately leaving more people with transplants that need them. This creates what’ll be a a pure play business that’s non correlated, and it’s really early days in our opinion in terms of all the exciting advancements that are gonna continue to fuel growth in this business.

I’m really excited that that I’ll be serving as co CEO with my colleague Melissa Tom Kiel, and we’ll be running the business much in the same way as we have for the last five years, creating some great continuity for our customers, our employees, and and all of our partners. Just just some quick details on the purchase consideration. About 90,000,000 of that is coming up front to us, and about $35,000,000 is subject to holdbacks related to employee retention and financial performance that I wouldn’t describe much as maintaining the status quo of the employees that currently exist at the company and maintaining the status quo in terms of the financial performance of the passenger business for that twelve months after the sale. So so, you know, we view these as readily achievable and and think we’ll be very well funded in the strata medical business as we’ll be renaming it following the close of the transaction to take advantage a lot of inorganic opportunities to layer on top of the great organic growth opportunity that’s right in front of us. So with that context, I’ll spend all the time today talking about the medical operations and I’ll start with just a little overview of of what it is we do and how organ transplantation logistics works in America for those of you that might not be familiar.

So so there’s really two key parties involved in the arrangement of organ transplants in America. There’s the transplant center, and that’s the hospital that has the patient that’s gonna receive that transplanted organ. There’s about 250 of them in America. And then there’s the organ procurement organization. This is the group that’s regionally responsible for getting folks to sign up to be organ donors, and they’re also responsible for identifying suitable donors, which unfortunately is less than one percent of deaths in America are eligible for organ donation.

But the great work that these folks do regionally is to maximize the number of people that can save a life through organ donation. Blade can can have either as a customer, but the vast majority of our business is focused on the transplant centers and they’re essentially the quarterbacks in any organ transplant logistics, dance, if you will. An organ procurement organization will identify a potential donor and then they make what’s called an organ offer to a transplant center. If the organ, is accepted by that transplant center, that is traditionally Blade’s attachment point and we offer what we call a one cut call solution where we take care of everything, soup to nuts, all of the logistics of where typically the transplant center is gonna send their own surgical staff to the location of the donor. They will wait.

Our aircraft will wait while the surgical staff procures the organ, and they’ll fly back right away because time is of the essence in organ transplant. The hearts, livers, and lungs that we focus on have very limited time to make it to the organ recipient between four and eight hours. So that’s why you need to use dedicated air transportation to to move organs from a to b, and you have very limited heads up in terms of when these transplant missions are gonna take place. So we’ve become what we believe is the largest transporter of of human organs in The United States, but really what we are is the largest network of aircraft that’s available on two hours notice in America. So we’ll talk a little bit about, all the other use cases there could be for that incredible network that we built.

But right now, we’re focused primarily on providing the best service that we can for all the transplant centers and organ procurement organizations that we serve. It’s it’s a really exciting time to be in this industry because more and more people are receiving the organs that they need thanks to technological and regulatory change. You know, sadly, still today, about fifteen people die every day waiting for an organ that they’re not going to get. But the good news is that both the the government in terms of regulation and a bunch of really innovative private companies are doing everything they can to to make that number zero. On the government regulation side, we’ve seen a steady drumbeat of improving regulations over the last five to ten years to where we’re prioritizing the sickest recipient, the the person who who may not have much additional time, getting them that organ first.

There’s still a long ways to go in terms of that being the number one priority in the matching process, but we’ve gone from a, an era where organs were matched in very arbitrary donor service areas with specific geographic boundaries to to where we’re we’re now looking in a specific number of miles away from a donor. We’re expanding that under certain circumstances. And then we have a long term process that that regulators are working through right now to move to what’s called continuous donation continuous matching where you’ll you’ll really prioritize the person that needs the organ the most first. And what we’ve seen is that the distance between a donor and a recipient has increased by about 50% over the last five, six years, and the growth rate in terms of number of folks that are receiving organ transplants in America has been growing consistently now in the mid high single digits. So so really exciting to see more people getting the organs that they need.

The other piece of this that’s been a huge driver of of growth in number of transplants is new technology. Number of really innovative companies, particularly in the world of perfusion, which is just a fancy word for pumping oxygenated blood through, an organ. This technology has accomplished two incredible things. One, we’ve expanded the aperture of which donors are suitable to actually donate organs. And we’ve been able to now consistently and successfully utilize more organs from donors whose hearts have stopped.

It’s called a DCD, a donor circulatory death donor. Huge unlock has been driven by perfusion technology that’s able to repair some of the damage that’s done when a donor’s heart stops. We’ve also been able to use this same technology to extend the period of time an organ can be in transit so you can more successfully match to a organ donor, a recipient that’s farther away, and also give the system more time to make a better match. Both of those things are extremely useful. These things come together very quickly, and and so the technology has made big improvements on both sides because for a variety of reasons, sometimes you think you have the appropriate match.

For whatever reason, the recipient can’t get to the hospital in time, you have to rematch. Perfusion technology allows you to not waste that organ in many cases and has really made the whole system more efficient. So right now the whole market for organ, transportation and related services including perfusion, we estimate is slightly above a billion dollars. But when you think about the underlying growth and number of transplants that are completed in America, you could be adding as much as a 100,000,000 of new addressable market every year. So it’s it’s a really attractive market that is prioritizing a really important mission of getting those organs to folks that need them.

However, all of this change and increased distances, the complexity, the trips, it’s put a lot of pressure on the legacy logistics providers. Used to be in this industry, very fragmented mom and pop operators of of a couple of light jets that are based close to a hospital. That worked when you weren’t flying very far or or or when the trips were not as complicated in terms of maybe bringing different third party service providers from different locations. Now with this new technology and new regulations, many of those aircraft simply can’t make the trip. And in some cases, the preservation technology or perfusion technology you wanna utilize can’t even fit through the door of the aircraft.

So this troop created a a really unique opportunity for us as actually the largest, most scaled provider of these kind of logistics in America to give transplant centers a flexible solution for this new paradigm. And it’s not just being able to have the aircraft that can make the longer trip or the aircraft that can fit the equipment you want. It’s it’s our hybrid philosophy on asset ownership. Only about a third of the flying that we do here is on aircraft that we own. There’s there’s another third or 50% that’s on aircraft that are a 100% dedicated to us that we control essentially on a on a wet lease.

And then there’s another 20% of aircraft in our flexible network. No commitment from us to that operator, but spread out all across the country, and we can use them on a moment’s notice with the ability to be more flexible for our customers providing services like an aircraft that’s on hot standby for a procurement surgery that may or may not happen. So so we think we’re very uniquely situated to thrive in this new paradigm of a more complicated organ transportation landscape, and also provide these services to our customers at lower cost than they could otherwise find. It’s because our DNA comes from aviation. And in aviation, scale is regional and really specific to the tail, the specific aircraft that you’re using.

You wanna put as many hours on that aircraft as possible. And so our our contractual model is designed to maximize this. We enter into long term contracts with our customers. Got about a 100% renewal rate over the last 12% on those contracts, to do a 100% of the transportation that they may need to do via air for the organs that they’re bringing in for their transplant recipients. And this allows us to move aircraft closer to that customer, which eliminates repositioning.

We charge per flight hour in these contracts. So we can charge them less if we don’t have to reposition. But maybe even more important, we’re able to have a quicker reaction time if the aircraft is already at the location that they’re gonna be departing from. So so it’s kind of a win win, and all we ask in return is that all the flying they do is done with us irrespective of of what preservation technology they might be using. We view ourselves as an open source logistics provider, and we take great steps to make sure that we can support anything that our customers wanna utilize for a particular mission.

You know, we still subscribe to to the old saying the customer is always right, and and that’s been our approach. And and we do think that it’s the right one in the marketplace right now because the number of different third party service providers you a customer can utilize for surgical recovery, for perfusion, for preservation. It’s becoming larger and larger. It’s becoming more competitive and more competitive. And so we try to be Switzerland here and support whatever it is our customer wants to do and just provide them with the lowest cost and most reliable logistics that they can find.

We’re we’re very fortunate that because of this service that we’ve been providing for many years now, our customers have recognized this great service we provide and they’ve asked us in some cases to take on more responsibility for them. Part of this is because of this one call solution we were talking about earlier. Once a customer accepts an organ, we’re taking care of everything, including procuring other services from other third parties. In some cases, we’ve found that we can provide those services internally at lower cost for our customer and also make an incremental margin. Ground is a great example of that.

We’ve always organized ground transportation for our customers, but often we did it through third parties that could be unreliable. And so now we’ve taken that same geographic scale that allows us to move aircraft assets closer to a customer, and we’ve used that to invest in now 50 lights and sirens SUVs that are spread across the country and enable us to provide more reliable ground service to our customers, moving not just organs and recovery teams to and from airports. But once we have that infrastructure in place, we can move other things. We’ve been moving blood samples, tissue samples. So it really builds and helps us create that time critical logistics platform more broadly.

We’ve also helped our customers with some of the work of actually clinically determining if organs are a good match for their recipients and dealing with some of the administrative work associated with that. Our service offering in this area is called COPS, Trinity Organ Placement Services, and we work deeply integrated with, the teams that are already at the transplant centers we serve to help them figure out if, for example, they’ve got a young recipient and an organ is offered for a very old donor, we’ll already have instructions in place from the surgical team that we don’t want to accept that organ, so we don’t wake anybody up in the middle of the night for that. If an organ’s accepted, we can also help with the administrative work of setting up OR times both at the location of the donor and at the recipient hospital. So so lots of work. And what we found is once customers start working with us on this front, they have more resources and they not only consider a larger number of potential organ offers than they would have before, they’re actually accepting more organs because they have more bandwidth to do so.

So that that’s a really exciting area. And when you look at these ancillaries together, the organ placement services, the the ground transportation services, it’s growing faster than our overall business, which is growing quite quickly. This quarter grew about 18% year over year, and it’s also higher margin. And and then when we ask our customers about it, they’re getting better service and they’re often saving money. So it’s rare that we can come together with a win win like this.

All of this combined with the transaction that we talked about in the beginning of this conversation, puts us in a position for a great opportunity for for capital deployment. Look at what we’ve done on ground. Look at what we’ve done on urban placement. There are other areas where our customers are procuring other services from third parties where we have an opportunity either organically or through acquisition to bring some of those services internal, provide them more efficiently as they’re integrated into our overall system, and also save our customers money. So we see that as a high priority for capital deployment.

We also see a roll off opportunity. There’s a lot of smaller providers of organ logistics services in The United States. We we have not felt a need to pay a multiple to to bring those businesses into the fold because frankly, we’ve done so well at winning the business organically through RFPs that we we haven’t felt a need to do that. But given the capital that we’re gonna have access to following the passenger divestiture, it could be something that we focus on again. And then there’s also opportunities to to bring some of the actual aircraft operations in house.

Right now even for our owned aircraft, we’re outsourcing the operation and maintenance of those aircraft and we pay significant management fees for that. There’s an opportunity to bring some of that in house. Then finally, we talked about how we have the largest network of aircraft ready to go twenty four seven on two hour call out. There’s many other things that need to move quickly both in health care and outside of health care. This is a high priority both for organic and inorganic growth, because we already have the network in place to do this, and it’ll allow us to add more scale in terms of number of hours that we’re flying, but just providing services with the exact same motion to a different set of customers.

So so we see these all as great opportunities alongside the things that we’ve been doing consistently, like deploying capital into vehicles where we see a 30% plus ROIC and on a select basis deploying some capital into aircraft. What we’ve said is that we expect to add a single digit number of new aircraft over the next year or two, but mostly we’re going to focus on areas where a customer requires an owned aircraft to win a contract. And in those cases, we’re seeing a two to three year payback on our investment in aircraft, and it’s a great opportunity to bring a new customer into the fold. Before I turn it back over to Suraj for questions, maybe just some quick summary of the financials. We talked about contracted business with with transplant centers and organ procurement organizations.

Generally, our contracts are committing our customer to do all of the flying they they’re gonna do to pick up organs with us irrespective of any third parties they might be utilizing for that particular organ recovery mission. Tend to have three to 5% escalators. Contracts auto renew. Excellent customer retention rate of a 100% over the last twelve months. And the the the way these contracts work is we charge a fixed price per hour of flight time actually flown, including repositioning, though we’re always trying to minimize repositioning for our customers.

In fact, it’s been a little bit of a top line headwind for us recently because we’ve been investing to save our customers money. And then we pass through anything that we can’t control. So that includes fuel, that includes any fees that might be charged by infrastructure operators. And we do have the ability to go outside of our network to other third party providers and just charge a markup if we need to do something that’s outside the scope in terms of distance or size of aircraft that we would normally provide. Our top service is a little bit different in that we just make a monthly fee for that.

And I should point out that in all cases, we’re being paid directly by the customer, the transplant center or the organ procurement organization, and we’re not dealing with insurance in any way. Though in this industry, it’s one of the things that the government has figured it out, really well here, there is a payback actually for the taxpayer in terms of getting an organ to someone who needs it because there’s nothing more expensive than someone being in the ICU or being on dialysis going through organ failure. So the government figured out a long time ago they want to do everything they can to incentivize getting organs to people that need them. And so ultimately, the the government through Medicare is covering a lot of the costs of organ transportation and all the administrative and logistics work that surrounds getting an organ to someone who needs it. But in terms of our involvement, we’re just getting paid directly by that customer.

Finally, on outlook, you know, saw great 18% growth in this most recent quarter. We talked last week on our earnings call about seeing 15% growth for the remainder of the year. We see this as a double digit growing business, just in terms of what you’re gonna see from the market. That’s mid to high single digit growth in number of organs, but more growth than that for a service provider like ourselves because of the escalators that are built in, because of of the the increased distances between organ donor and organ recipient, and because of all the ancillary services that we’re now providing to our customers on top of just the organ logistics. And we think the the best is yet to come, particularly for all the folks that are on the transplant list, waiting for an organ out there.

So so with that, I’ll, maybe turn it back over to you, Sauraz, in case you have any questions.

Suraj Kalia, Senior Analyst, Oppenheimer: Sure. So, Will, thank you for, the presentation. Obviously, a lot is going on in the in the transplant space, and you guys are in the thick of things. So, I can appreciate you you condensing all that information. Will, before I jump into my questions, let me ask, you know, client questions as they come in.

So I’m just reading verbatim. Could you talk about the expected annual free cash flow of the medical business in f y twenty five? What is the long term margin potential of the medical business?

Will Hayburn, CFO, Blade Mobility: Sure. So so the guidance that we gave on on the passenger divestiture was that it would be neutral to adjusted EBITDA and to free cash flow. So the guidance we had given for ’25 was for double digit adjusted EBITDA, and that does not change with the passenger divestiture. We have not given guidance yet for for 2026, but we look forward to having an analyst day in the fall where we’ll dive into that in a little more detail. But onto the second part of your question, you know, we’re about 15% segment adjusted EBITDA margin target for the remainder of the year.

And what we’ve said is in the midterm, we expect that to get to high teens. And the drivers of that are are are really simple economies of scale. Now that we have the third of our capacity that’s being flown on owned aircraft, the more we fly, the less it cost. We went through a period of very heavy maintenance here in the first half of the year of 2025. We’re getting through that, through quarter, through the third quarter here.

And then we have lower than average maintenance expected in 2026. But we talked about in our earnings call, we had about roughly double the amount of maintenance that we would have expected in a normal distribution for the first half of the year. So it has two negative impacts on our margins and why they were below the 15% target in the first half of the year. On the one hand, our most cost effective and most profitable flying is on those owned aircraft. So some of them weren’t available because they were down for maintenance.

On the other hand, many of the costs associated with the those aircraft like pilots, for example, or insurance, they still exist whether you’re flying the aircraft or not. So you have some fixed cost deleverage during the first half of the year. But as we get to a more normal period, you should see those margins expand to to the high teens.

Suraj Kalia, Senior Analyst, Oppenheimer: Fair enough. So, Will, you provided some interesting information. I’ll keep it very generic. You said a third of of your flights you’ll own. You have a two hour call out, you know, by your end customers.

There’s a two to three year payback. Maybe if you can just tell us where does strata or the blade medical part of it how does how does some of these metrics compare to, let’s say, the industry average, if I may? Not necessarily TransMedics, but just how does how does your efficiency stack up relative to others? Maybe if you can provide some additional granularity.

Will Hayburn, CFO, Blade Mobility: I I guess in terms of the feedback we get when we win a new customer, particularly in a competitive RFP where where anyone can can compete, the the feedback we get in terms of why we were selected. And, you know, we won two RFPs that started on on April 1 with new customers taking some more share and both of these are examples of that. I I think that the big things we hear is that we’re willing to move aircraft closer to the customer and so that means that you’re going to reposition less. Oftentimes you’re competing against folks that have aircraft in certain locations, but their scale is not on a customer by customer basis And so almost all flights have significant repositioning associated with them. Our model is a little different where we’re trying to get that geographic scale.

So that’s one of the key selling points in our model. And and often we hear from our customers, we pick you because you’re putting an aircraft right at our home airport that our surgeons can drive to, and and we know that you’re gonna be ready to go very quickly so that we can react quickly. Particularly, Suraj, as you know, in this world of expedited offers and things changing very quickly, that’s become a much more important point for these folks. And then, you know, the other thing that comes up a lot is our flexibility. We do own 10 aircraft and they’re all Hawker eight hundreds, but we’re not tied to a specific aircraft type.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We’re able to put our customers in a mission appropriate aircraft and we’re also able to source aircraft for our customers in locations outside of their primary departure point. That’s part of our asset light network of all the safety vetted operators that we have in our network across the country. So so that helps them in terms of if they’re flying a short distance, particularly in the Northeast as an example, you’re not gonna use Hawker 800 to go from New York to Philadelphia. You know, you’re gonna use a helicopter.

You’re gonna do it for less than $10,000 and it’s also gonna be faster. So so we really try to put our customers’ best interests at heart and we’re able to do that and maintain alignment with our shareholders because we’re not stuck with one particular kind of aircraft. And oftentimes in this these RFPs, we’ll see folks that show up and they’ve got a couple of aircraft. Let’s make it up. They’ve got two Challenger three hundreds.

If if that’s what you have, every day is a pretty good day to fly a Challenger 300. That may not make sense if you’re flying only a 100 miles. So we’ll move in turboprops, we use whatever is appropriate. So I I think those are the two really key things. You know, cost does matter.

Not a 100% of of logistics costs are getting reimbursed, by the government here. So so we find that that our customers are price sensitive and we offer a very competitive price. We believe we’re the lowest cost provider when you think about reducing the repositioning and all that together on a per trip cost basis. But really what I think gets us that 100% retention rate is our ability to say yes every time, do what’s right for our customer even if we make a little less money by giving them a smaller plan on a particular trip. That’s what creates these long term relationships with our customers.

Suraj Kalia, Senior Analyst, Oppenheimer: Agreed. Well, we are almost up on time. I have another question about your relationship with Organox, but client client questions deserve priority. So one of the questions is, how will utilization be affected with the loss of the passenger business?

Will Hayburn, CFO, Blade Mobility: So there’s no overlap between the the jet aircraft that we utilize in the medical business and the passenger business. So so it won’t be impacted at all. The only cross functional aircraft are the rotorcraft that we utilize in the New York City aircraft. And as part of this transaction, we have a long term agreement with Joby to continue using those aircraft in the exact same way that we have in the past. It’s a very small part of our business.

You know, less than 1% of the revenue of the of the business is is from rotorcraft, but it is an important strategic point for our customers and to that flexibility, you know, we wanna use the the most efficient aircraft for our customers. So we made sure to have a long term agreement to continue having access. And then I’d also point out that as part of that long term agreement, we have access to Joby eVTOL for medical purposes in any market where they bring them. That’s a longer term exciting play for us and I’m looking forward to their first introduction of eVTOL in The US. But but in terms of any benefits that we received from the passenger business, none on the vast majority of the business, and we dealt with it contractually on the rotorcraft.

Suraj Kalia, Senior Analyst, Oppenheimer: Perfect. Well, we are up on time. Thank you so much for taking the time this afternoon, and and congratulations on your new role. Wish you all the success, and I’m sure we’ll connect soon. And to all of those, who participated in the call, folks, we really do appreciate your participation.

Thank you so much.

Will Hayburn, CFO, Blade Mobility: Right. Thank you so much. Take care.

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