Archer Aviation Inc.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Archer Aviation Company Q1 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Kate Kuehl, Head of Investor Relations. Kate, please go ahead.

Welcome to Archer's Earnings Call. This is Kate Keywell, Archer's Head of Investor Relations. Today, we will be making forward-looking statements that are based on current assumptions. We don't undertake any obligation to update those assumptions as a result of new information or future events. Risks and uncertainties may cause our actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. For more information about potential risks and uncertainties, review the risk factors in our SEC filings. Today, we will also be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of those measures is included in our earnings release from today. Now, I'll turn it over to Adam. Adam?

Thank you and good afternoon. I want to start by stepping back because the opportunities unfolding across the aerospace and defense market right now are massive. The future is arriving all at once, and the investments we are making across our civil, defense, and AI software businesses are forming a flywheel that increasingly reinforces itself. We are seeing that momentum unfold across the ecosystem. The US government is leaning in. President Trump, the DOT, and the FAA delivered the eVTOL integration pilot program last year, creating real-world testing environments for next-generation aircraft. And recently, Archer was selected as a partner in three of the winning EIPP applications across eight states. We are on track to begin flying under that program in U.S. cities later this year. Simultaneously, this administration is targeting to deploy over $20 billion for ATC modernization, an investment that would unlock new levels of safety and throughput across the national airspace. Foreign governments are following suit. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Japan, and numerous others are building infrastructure and accelerating regulatory pathways to position themselves at the forefront of this new form of transportation. The largest airlines worldwide are also recognizing this moment and stepping up. We already work with seven of them across our businesses, and our multi-billion dollar order book for midnight continues to grow. And the world's biggest stages are eager to showcase this future. We are collaborating closely with the LA28 Olympic Games, DOT, FAA, surrounding communities, and other stakeholders to plan our launch of air taxi operations as the official provider for the games. It will be millions watching as the future is being built in America. Let's focus on our air taxi progress. The reason we are positioned where we are today, a leader in the industry, traces back to the decisions that we made on day one. Archer's path to commercializing eVTOL has always been rooted in a first principles approach, designing a safe passenger-carrying aircraft purpose-built for rapid back-to-back trips of 20 to 50 miles in urban environments at low cost with a low noise profile. When I entered this sector... Most of the competitors had spent a decade cycling through configurations. Archer committed very early on to a partial tilt architecture designed for the air taxi use case and for FAA certification from day one. That discipline has compounded. Eight years in, no one else in the eVTEL industry has moved as fast as we have. And while the majority of our team is battling day to day to get through the final phase of certification and bring this new mode of transportation to market, I am focused on ensuring we future-proof our ability to scale. A type-certifiable design is not enough. It requires us to solve two additional challenges. The first key unlock is industrial scale. We need to continue pushing our entire industrial base forward here in the U.S., which will deliver meaningful cost and performance improvements with each new generation of midnight. Advanced materials, new manufacturing processes, further advanced propulsion systems, and components built for volume production on the scale of autos. We have to prove out these innovations before the FAA will allow us to use them in commercially certified aircraft. We will deploy them first in autonomous, attributable, dual-use aircraft for cargo and defense, and then flow these technologies back to future iterations of Midnight, helping unlock step-change improvements in cost and performance. This is just one example of how our three business lines compound on one another. The second key unlock is modernizing our national airspace. America's airspace today is a limiter on America's GDP growth, and we have to give it the ability to scale. While it can likely safely handle the additional traffic we expect over the next three to five years, the long-term scale of air taxis and AAM will require the U.S. to rework the infrastructure and software underlying air traffic control. The good news is this administration, and in particular, Secretary Duffy and Administrator Bedford, get this and are tackling it head-on. Today's system was not built for the volume or the kind of traffic that's coming over the next decade. This is why we've partnered with category-defining technology leaders, including Palantir, which was recently down-selected as a finalist for the FAA's SMART program, as well as NVIDIA and Starlink, both of which will bring next-generation capabilities to midnight. We are focused on bringing the most innovative technologies to address the challenges we face. These are not adjacencies. They are the imperatives that will drive the flywheel, a mocking massive scale. But they are years-long efforts. The time to invest is now, and the good news is we are already executing against all of them. Let me turn to how we executed this quarter. We had a banner quarter on certification. Archer became the first eVTOL company to close Phase 3 of the FAA's four-phase type certification process, and we have been advancing Phase 4 in parallel for some time now. Coupled with that exciting progress, this was also our most expansive quarter for our flight test program. With piloted VTOL and CTOL flights across our expanded midnight fleet on a nearly daily basis and often multiple times a day. This quarter, we also took over operations at Hawthorne Airport in L.A. We have begun modernizing it so it can serve as an air taxi and mobility hub for the city of L.A. and its surrounding communities. and as our innovation hub for the next generation airspace technology we are developing with our partners. On the defense side, our work with Anduril continues to accelerate. As I discussed in my letter to the shareholders, defense procurement is a performance and cost equation. You cannot retrofit your way into the right solution. You must take a first principles approach. Our partnership with Anduril is doing just that. We chose to partner with Andrel because, among other strengths, they deeply understand what the U.S. and its allies need in next generation of BTEL aircraft, beyond the legacy programs that have been entrenched for 50-plus years. Together, we have designed and begun building our clean-sheet hybrid aircraft, drawing on the technologies Archer has developed for Midnight and the IP we acquired from Karam, Overair, and Lilium. The window for these decades-long programs of record are approaching fast, and we will be ready. I continue to be amazed by what our teams can do. I firmly believe the Archer-Andrell team is one of the greatest aerospace teams of this generation. Top technical fellows from Boeing, former chief engineers from Lockheed, leading PhD researchers from Stanford. You only get a chance to be part of a team like this once. I believe our hybrid dual-use autonomous aircraft will be the most sophisticated vertical lift platform ever developed in its category. It is not incremental. It is generational. When people see what we have built, they will recalibrate their beliefs about what America can field. I cannot wait to show it off. Stay tuned. Archer is now a multi-threat company. We expect to start initial air taxi operations in U.S. cities, begin winning phased government defense awards, and begin to deploy our AI solutions later this year. And we are executing from a position of strength with $1.8 billion in liquidity. I've never been more confident in what Archer is building or more proud of the team building it. With that, I'll turn it over to Priya.