Three aviation technology businesses built inside Boeing are moving to a smaller company focused on electric air taxis. Electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, describes aircraft designed to lift off and land like helicopters but powered by battery-driven electric motors instead of combustion engines. Archer Aviation (NYSE: ACHR) has signed definitive agreements to acquire Wisk Aero, SkyGrid, and Insitu from Boeing (NYSE: BA); the announcement sent Archer shares up 16% while Boeing climbed 0.5% to about $234.
Three businesses, one common thread
Wisk Aero built autonomous eVTOL aircraft and has completed more than 1,700 flight tests across six generations of hardware. Insitu makes uncrewed aircraft systems used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. SkyGrid provides ground-based air traffic management software designed to coordinate automated airspace.
Across all three, the companies report nearly two million combined flight hours. Archer said the autonomy technologies from all three will feed into its ZEE artificial intelligence platform. Adam Goldstein, Archer's founder and chief executive, described the deal as a major step toward expanding the company beyond its existing air taxi business.
What Boeing holds onto
Boeing exits the subsidiaries but keeps a meaningful position in the technology. Under the agreement, Boeing retains access to Wisk's core autonomous flight technology for use in its current and next-generation commercial and defense aircraft. It also retains a stake in Archer itself.
Brian Yutko, Boeing's vice president of Commercial Airplanes Product Development, said the arrangement is expected to let Wisk, SkyGrid, and Insitu develop capabilities faster and reach the market sooner. For Boeing, he said, the deal allows the company to keep drawing on two decades of investment in these technologies through continued work inside its core operations.
Three markets, one balance sheet
The deal is designed to put Archer into commercial aerospace, defense, and air traffic management simultaneously. Those are distinct businesses: civilian air taxis, military surveillance drones, and airspace coordination software each carry separate regulatory requirements, different customer bases, and revenue timelines that have little in common. Archer has not published financial terms of the acquisition.
What was signed is the definitive agreement. Whether the expanded platform generates revenue at scale remains to be demonstrated, and the nearly two million combined flight hours across the three units is the clearest tangible measure of where the underlying work stands today.