Archer Aviation Inc.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for attending today's Archer Aviation second quarter 2023 financial results conference call. My name is Sierra and I will be your moderator today. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Andy Misson with Archer. Please proceed.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review Archer's second quarter 2023 operating and financial results. My name is Andy Misson, the chief legal officer of Archer. On the call today are Adam Goldstein, our founder and CEO, Mark Messler, our CFO, Tom Yuniz, our COO, and Billy Nolan, who joined Archer in June as our chief safety officer. Please note that during today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. For more information about these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our SEC filings under the caption risk factors, including our upcoming form PENQ filing for the quarter ended June 30, 2023. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we may discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of certain GAAP and non-GAAP measures is included in our shareholder letter posted on our IR website. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Adam. Adam?

Thanks, Andy. Over the last seven earnings calls, you've heard me consistently reiterate Archer's strategy of finding the most efficient path to commercializing our world-class eVTOL aircraft as safely as possible. Every quarter, our team has continued to relentlessly execute against that plan. And I'm excited to announce that over the past 90 days, some of the largest stakeholders in aviation have publicly joined us in supporting our strategy. First, we're grateful to share multiple points of endorsement from across the United States government. I'm extremely proud to announce that just last week, the Federal Aviation Administration issued our special airworthiness certificate for our first midnight aircraft, allowing us to begin flying. With this certificate in hand, our team will ramp up both our flight schedule and our fleet size as we work towards our planned 2025 commercial launch. This is a great milestone for Archer and I'm proud of the teams at both Archer and the FAA who work tirelessly to ensure our aircraft can begin flying on our desired timeline. This announcement comes on the heels of last month's Advanced Air Mobility Implementation Plan that the FAA published as the culmination of years of collaboration with Archer and other industry leaders. This innovative roadmap reinforced the government's commitment to U.S. leadership in this sector, as well as Archer's expected launch of our commercial service in 2025 by leveraging existing operating rules and infrastructure. Further, the FAA has laid out a plan for making the necessary enhancements to the country's air traffic control systems and operating rules to enable thriving full-scale passenger eVTOL aircraft service by 2028, in time to showcase UAM at the Los Angeles Olympics. The leader who directed and oversaw much of this implementation plan and commitment to the timeline for commercial launch by 2025 and full-scale operations by 2028 was no other than the distinguished FAA Administrator, Captain Billy Noland. who announced his decision to leave the FAA to join Archer as our chief safety officer back in June. With over 30 years of experience in safety, regulatory affairs, and flight operations, as well as senior executive roles at American Airlines and Qantas Airways, in addition to his service in the U.S. Army as an airplane and helicopter pilot and safety officer, Billy is the ideal person to guide Archer through the most efficient pathway to FAA certification and commercial deployment. He has long been a stock supporter of the eVTOL aircraft industry, spearheading our country's and the FAA's global leadership role in this important area. And his appointment as our Chief Safety Officer underscores our commitment to safety and innovation. Before joining Archer, Billy conducted a thorough assessment of the competitive landscape. You'll hear shortly from Billy about why he chose to come to Archer and belief in our approach of optimizing our design for certification and focusing on developing only the most critical enabling technologies in-house while also partnering with leading suppliers. With Billy on board, I've already started to see him help us shape the future of transportation and make sustainable, efficient air travel an everyday reality. Second, we are honored that just last week, the US Air Force awarded Archer contracts with the largest contract value of any OEM in the eVTOL industry, with a value of up to $142 million. The DoD has made an unprecedented commitment to helping Archer accelerate our technology This agreement was made possible through our longstanding partnership with the Department of Defense on a series of projects through the Air Force's AFORCS program, which has been assessing the transformational potential of the vertical flight market and eVTOL technologies for DoD purposes. In this new execution phase of our partnership, Archer will deliver aircraft to the Air Force. They will test these aircraft to support future missions in personnel transport and logistics support, rescue operations, and more. These applications of our midnight aircraft, we hope, will not only help save lives, but also accelerate our technology and operational learnings as we build a world-class consumer aircraft and service. Today, we're announcing that we have accelerated our plans and hope to deliver the first aircraft within the next six months as early as Q4 2023. We believe this would be the first eVTOL aircraft in history to be delivered to a paying customer. Given the strength of the team that is working on this at Archer, we anticipate leveraging this contract as a platform for future partnerships with the other branches of the Armed Forces, which would increase the total value of our relationship with the DOD. In fact, just last week, we hosted representatives from the US Marine Corps at Archer headquarters and our flight test facility to demonstrate the capabilities of our midnight aircraft. A lot of this was made possible by our recently assembled six-member Government Services Advisory Board, who was critical in helping to build our first step of this partnership with the military. I'm sincerely grateful for the support of the DoD, Captain Nolan, our Government Service Advisory Board members, and all of the Archer teammates and veterans for their continued service and support in ensuring the U.S. maintains its leadership position in aviation. Finally, I have long maintained that the eVTOL industry and Archer have been able to move as quickly as we are because of aviation and technology pioneers who, for decades, have pushed the envelope on what is possible. collectively transporting millions of people around the world with unparalleled levels of safety. Today, I'm excited to announce a strategic relationship with the biggest aerospace giant of them all, Boeing. Boeing was actually one of the first to fly a fixed-wing VTOL aircraft, the V-22 Osprey, over 30 years ago, and today I'm excited to call them one of Archer's investors. Our collaboration with Boeing and its subsidiary UIST will be focused on supporting the integration of WISC's autonomy technology in future variants of our aircraft. For background, WISC was co-founded by Google founder Larry Page, who was an early pioneer of the eVTOL industry and one of the sector's biggest advocates in pushing the development of flight autonomy technology. This collaboration could bring for Archer the potential to access world-leading autonomy technology while substantially reducing the cost of developing it ourselves. As the collaboration matures, we will share further details, but it is important to understand that this puts Archer in a unique position to be able to source autonomy technology from a leader in the industry. This is a natural extension of our overall strategy of focusing our in-house research and development on the key enabling technology that cannot be sourced from the existing aerospace supply base. As part of this new collaboration, Archer, Boeing, and WISC have agreed to settle the litigation between the parties and collectively look to the future. I look forward to working with Boeing and WISC on a collaboration that looks forward to the growth and development of the AAM industry. But that's not all. As part of the party's collaboration, we are excited to welcome Boeing as an investor in today's $215 million funding round. alongside our other longtime strategic partners, Stellantis and United. The deep partnership we are seeing from Stellantis across the business is unrivaled. From their continued willingness to provide us the capital we need to accelerate our business, to the support and energy CEO Carlos Tavares and CTO Ned Couric bring to the table, to their dozens of full-time Stellantis employees working alongside ours as we jointly build out the world's first high-volume eVTOL manufacturing facility in Georgia. We are seeing similar commitment from our partner, United Airlines, who is an integral player in our push towards our goal of achieving commercialization in 2025, as we work to fulfill United's billion-dollar order for Archer's Midnight aircraft. The team at United is working with us hand in hand in important launch markets such as New York City and Chicago, where United is developing innovative approaches to operating our aircraft within its Newark and O'Hare airport hubs to enable a world-class customer experience door to door. I'm proud to call Boeing, United, and Stellantis partners who are not merely partners in name, but partners who are truly invested and working toward a collective long-term success in eVTOL. Importantly, as part of this financing, we are grateful to have the support of major long-term financial investors, such as ARK Invest, who share our long-term outlook for Archer and our role leading the eVTOL industry. As I reflect on these remarkable accomplishments, I want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to our incredible team, partners, and shareholders. Together, we are pioneering a new era of aviation, driving innovation and revolutionizing transportation for generations to come. Before I turn it over to Tom, let's take a step back for a second. In the last quarter alone, the United States military and government have both made an unwavering commitment that America will lead the way in commercializing eVTOL. The FAA has validated the timeline for both Archer and Joby to bring our aircraft to market in the US in 2025. And we both proudly hosted more than 70 members of President Biden's AAM interagency working group last month for a private flight test. Additionally, the Department of Defense has committed to nearly $300 million in contract value across the sector, providing incredible momentum for being the first country to bring eVTOL to market. When midnight takes to the skies in the coming weeks, it will mark a new era in advanced era mobility. Our team's hard work and dedication have brought us to this exciting moment, and we can't wait to see midnight and our industry soar. Thank you for joining us on this thrilling journey, and I look forward to your questions later in the call. I will now hand it over to Tom, who will dive into the technical aspects of our strategy and how those also have begun to bear fruit.