Beta Technologies, Inc. Class A

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Beta Technologies fourth quarter and full year 2025 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 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand the call over to Devin Rothman, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Warren, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Beta Technologies' fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. Joining me today are Kyle Clark, our founder and chief executive officer, and Herman Kudo, our chief financial officer. Following their prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A, where Kristin Costello, our head of government and regulatory affairs, will also join us. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing our fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results, as well as our outlook for 2026. We also published our investor presentation, which is available on the investor relations section of our website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our filings with the SEC for a discussion of these risks. We will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings materials. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kyle.

Thanks, Devin, and good morning, everyone. The fourth quarter was a strong finish to a defining year for Beta. In 2025, we showed up in the air and with our customers and regulators and in the capital markets. We did so in a way that reflects the discipline and pragmatism that defined this company. We achieved several milestones in 2025 that materially advanced certification, commercialization, and defense. We made meaningful progress across our certification programs with three notable achievements. We earned a part 35 type certification for our propeller in partnership with Hartzell. We closed our G1 certification basis on the A250 vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And we began four credit testing on our part 33 motor. We advanced our commercial efforts with successful customer deployments, both domestically and internationally. We flew our aircraft across Europe and we opened the Paris Airshow. We flew at Oshkosh. We set multiple world records and we won the Pulitzer Air Race. We flew the first all-electric passenger flight in and out of JFK Airport. We completed our phase one contract with General Dynamics and our defense programs continue to grow. We also launched our strategic partnership and joint technology development program with GE. In 2025 and continuing to 2026, we are seeing significant regulatory tailwinds. In December, Department of Transportation released the AAM National Strategy, which is very much aligned with Beta Strategy. Congress continues to invest in our future. Recently, through the introduction of the bipartisan legislation titled the Aviation Innovation and Global Competitiveness Act, which will bring increased transparency to the FAA's policy and guidance development in certification programs, which is most important for AAM technologies. This outlines a partnership between the FAA and industry that improves the predictability of their deliverables, helping with our planning while preserving the agency's gold standard for safety and oversight. Looking ahead to 2026, we are awaiting the announcement of the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, or EIPP, which is being led by the FAA and US Department of Transportation. Following an executive order issued in June of 2025, this program will likely allow for early commercial operations of electric aircraft. This has the potential to be a huge opportunity for Beta by advancing our entire business model by more than a year. Already, the proposal process has highlighted excitement for electric aviation across the country with commercial operators, local governments, and in rural communities. We expect selection announcements very shortly. This program presents a different opportunity to each company. Uniquely for Beta, it's not only the airplane deployments, but also the charge network, which will significantly expand over the next three years. We have submitted applications touching 41 states for different types of use cases, including cargo, medical, and passenger in both our CTOL and VTOL aircraft. Beta is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity for a few reasons. First, the FAA will prioritize safety through system and aircraft maturity. We have more real-world operational experience flying electric aircraft with customers than the rest of the industry combined. Our aircraft have flown nationwide supporting cargo, medical, and passenger missions in busy airspace and in all weather, backed by a complete ecosystem of pilot training, maintenance, safety, and the reliability required for commercial operations. Second, we own and operate the only UL-certified aircraft charging network. EIPP represents a major opportunity to accelerate the expansion of this network. Additionally, as the only existing charge network, we're partnering with other OEMs to identify priority charging sites required to support their proposed future EIPP missions as well. This advances our strategy to maintain ownership of the network that controls the flow of energy into electric aviation. Third, communities across the country have identified how our aircraft can meet their transportation needs today. We are honored to have our aircraft named in more applications than any other company in the industry, and we look forward to continuing to deliver for our nation, our partners, and our investors. When we last spoke in December, I laid out five key performance indicators that we believe are the most effective and transparent way to track our progress. Starting with our backlog, 2025 was a commercial win for Beta for aircraft, but more uniquely in the sale of motors and other technologies to partners like Embraer EVE and General Dynamics. Over the course of the year, we added over $1 billion to our commercial aircraft backlog and separately an additional $1 billion to our backlog of enabling technologies. Our current aircraft backlog sits at 891 aircraft in firm and option orders backed by a financial commitment. By the end of the year, we expect our commercial aircraft backlog to top $4 billion and to steadily increase our enabling technologies backlog. Next, we topped 125,000 nautical miles flown, a significant increase since last time we spoke. These miles are a demonstration of the safety and reliability of our CTOE and our VTOE aircraft. We believe this simple metric of airplanes doing what they are designed to do, to fly, will continue to differentiate Beta within AAM. For 2026, our goal is to hit a quarter million nautical miles flown. Third, for our charge network, we've activated two new sites since we last spoke and focused the permit applications for additional sites in preparation for our EIPP and customer-driven network growth. Our goal for 2026 is to reach 150 total charge sites. Fourth, on production, we're focused on building conforming articles for the first half of this year before ramping to four and a half aircraft per month by the end of the year. These conforming articles directly support certification, which takes us to our next KPI. We made meaningful progress across our three certification programs, particularly on our H500A electric engine. When we last spoke, we had completed the build and FAA conformity inspection of two electric engines. By the end of 2025, we completed the build and FAA conformity inspection on 11 propulsion systems, resulting in a complete set of test assets plus spares. Consistent with our certification strategy, we've started with the highest risk and longest duration test first and have completed one of the most demanding and long duration tests, the durability test, which involved 1,000 hours of runtime through a variety of environments and intermediate inspections. Endurance testing, which similarly places sustained stress on the engine, is well underway. We're continuing to make progress across the remaining certification test areas as well. Additionally, something less talked about but critical to achieving type certification is software testing. We are 85% complete requirements-based software testing with a projected completion date of these tests by the end of April. In our CTOL program, we are now substantially complete with our means of compliance in the requirements definition phase of the project. We have completed 98% of the regs covered in the DDS collector. All but two issue papers are closed, and those remaining have been agreed to and are in the final stage of documenting the closed position. We've also made strides in the compliance planning, having submitted 17 of 20 total certification plans with nine already accepted, enabling the start of early test activities and solidifying the plan for the road to TIA and type certification. Planning for certification test activities has also started with the FAA accepting six structural test plans and 12 flight test plans. Preliminary safety assessments have been reviewed with the FAA as part of our preparation for type inspection authorization, or TIA. Our VTOL program is benefiting from our CTOL program work on means of compliance and certification plans, all of which we plan to reuse at a significant level. This transferability is enabled by the commonality of our CTOE and VTOE aircraft. We don't mark our progress until our partners at the FAA have accepted and approved our work. Our A250 engineering flight test program is continuing out of our Plattsburgh, New York facility. We're making steady progress and collecting an immense amount of data on the performance of our lift propulsion systems that support our certification efforts. Shifting to defense. The January 2026 executive order prioritizing the warfighter and defense contracting is an urgent directive to defense primes to identify and engage with advanced agile American companies that have proven ability. We have been approached by three prime defense contractors and are evaluating these opportunities. We've completed phase one of our programs, both with General Electric and with General Dynamics, and we hit our deliverables with Army DevCom. These programs were an excellent demonstration of Beta's capabilities. We are working towards the next phases, which presents significantly higher revenue opportunities. Additionally, in response to growing demand signals for low-cost, flexible unmanned assets, we have accelerated our MV250 program by six months. Our partnership with GE and our ability to scale production rapidly puts us in the position to meet the nation's defense needs. The military is supporting this effort and has funded our development of autonomy and hybridization technology with a contract from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM. Each of our aircraft have been designed with acute self-awareness and a set of capabilities to unlock autonomous operations. The fly-by-wire system, which our beta-developed flight controllers are the foundation of, can natively receive control inputs from a computer instead of a human. This is a key differentiator from other autonomous aircraft because nothing needs to be redesigned or fundamentally altered to be flown without anyone at the controls. We delivered a full ship set plus spares of lift and pusher electric engines to EVE, allowing them to successfully fly their VTOL aircraft. We've been working closely with the amazing team at EVE and have mutually benefited from this relationship. This year will be defined by conforming aircraft, earning the first FAA-type certification for our propulsion systems, more defense work, ramping production, and deploying aircraft and charge systems into commercial operations. We don't expect any of this to be easy, but the team here at Beta has the grit to do the hard work and a clear vision. Herman, you're up.