Archer Aviation Inc. (ACHR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning. Welcome to the second of 3 in a row fireside chats with some eVTOL companies. We've invited these companies to our Auto Conferences, a lot of these companies have partnerships with automotive companies. But the reality is that if we think about the mobility scheme over the long term, urban air mobility is going to be a key part of that. And we have Nikhil Goel, maybe I said that wrong. But anyway, you can introduce yourself in a second, but then I'd like you to introduce the company, and then we'll do a fireside chat. Happy to take questions from the audience, which I failed to do in the first one, but we'll do it better this time. But thanks for supporting our Auto Conference for the first time, and hopefully, we can do this annually.

All right. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Welcome, everyone. Good morning. Nikhil Goel from Archer Aviation, Chief Commercial Officer.

With that, if you can maybe provide an overview of the business as well. There's probably people here that are generalists or maybe just don't know the story as well. So maybe if we're less familiar, you can frame the opportunity as well as the opportunity for eVTOL in the market over the longer term.

Yes, absolutely. So Archer Aviation, we built all electric vertical takeoff and landing air taxis. Our founder, Adam Goldstein, founded the company in 2018. I personally was at Uber prior to that, where I founded the Uber Elevate business, which is one of the first in the world to really look at the market based on the data and the insights that Uber had, we had the insight that all electric vertical takeoff and landing air taxis would be potentially very large form of modality to move people in and around cities. And Archer is one of the companies that was founded to really help capture that mission. So today, we've raised about $3.3 billion to date. We've got about 1,200 employees at our San Jose headquarters and several others all over the world. On the commercial side of the business, we are focused on commercializing air taxis, both here in the United States as well as abroad, starting with the UAE. We also have a defense business, Archer Defense, in which we're focusing on building a hybrid electric variant of our Midnight aircraft that is focused on defense use cases as well. And then we've got a software business that we haven't spoken too much about where we are using artificial intelligence to help further advancements in aviation. So excited to be here this morning and happy to chat more.

Great. So maybe starting off on a high level, can you help frame the U.S. regulatory landscape as it relates to advanced air mobility, especially given a lot of recent news flow around government support for drones, autonomous, hybrid aircrafts and so forth?

Yes, absolutely. Look, at a high level, what I will say and having been in the eVTOL industry for about a decade, this is probably the most leaned in I've seen not just the federal government, but governments at all levels across the United States ever on eVTOL and just on advanced air mobility in general. So the federal government, in particular, have spent a lot of time out in D.C. with our Founder and CEO, Adam. And there have been so many executive orders across the field of aviation, things like Supersonic, things like ATC. There are 2 in particular that have been really, really relevant to Archer. The first was just last week. So a couple of months ago, Archer was selected as the official and exclusive partner for the LA28 Olympics. And that was really important because what it did for the very first time in the industry was it sort of aligned public sector and private industry around a specific date, which is in the summer of 2028, the vision that a single city, Los Angeles, would be not just launched, but at scale with certified eVTOLs, moving people in and around Southern California. And so that was really big for us. And then last week, President Trump issued an executive order where he commissioned a White House task force. That task force is responsible for overseeing security and transportation for the Olympics. And so that was really great to see kind of that federal level of lean in. And then at the local level, the way that, that's transpired is you've seen real estate groups, both our existing real estate partners like SoFi Stadium and USC as well as new real estate groups really lean in and say, hey, I want to be a piece of the puzzle. You've seen our technology suppliers and our vendors say, okay, this is an unmovable date. We're going to make sure to scale up our production and have certified parts for you. We've seen all of our partners really come together in a magical way. The second was in June, we worked very, very closely with the former CTO of the White House, Michael Kratsios, now Director of the Office of Science, Technology and Policy, Secretary Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation and several others across D.C. to craft what became the executive order for "American dominance" in the space. And this is really important. It was actually very similar to something Michael Kratsios and team put together during the last Trump administration for delivery drones and other UAV use cases. But this time, a large focus of the EO was on eVTOL. So what it did was it established the eVTOL IPP, the integration pilot program. And what that envisions is and what that will implement with the DOT and with the FAA is a program across 5 jurisdictions, 5 geographies in the United States with different American OEMs where they will be deployed early as soon as next year against specific use cases like air taxi. And so that, to your point, Bill, creates what we believe to be an expedited pathway. And all of these things just really showcase how leaned in the federal government is, how leaned in the FAA is and how much support we're getting at the federal and regulatory levels.

Yes. So are you saying that the EO actually potentially accelerates the pace of adoption as well as potentially bringing from the certification time line? Or -- I mean, I think how does the EO relate to basically the FAA and their own certification and all the procedures they have?

Yes. Look, it's not sort of deterministic in that exact way. The way that we think about it is, first of all, it just shows how much the federal government, the DOT and the FAA are valuing eVTOLs. Two, is what it does is it bookends on how you should think about our deployment and certification in the U.S. So on the sort of left side of the bookend, it's deploying eVTOLs as soon as next year in an American city under the executive order passed in June. And then on the right side of the equation, you can envision our air taxis as part of our LA28 partnership at scale in Los Angeles. And so think about all the steps that have to happen in between there. You've got to sort of scale your deployments. Obviously, you've got to get FAA certified. And then you have to prove that you are operating multiple routes across certified vertiports in Los Angeles and really get to a point where you're at steady state at scale for the Olympics. And that's what the FAA is looking for. That's what we have committed to our partners. And so that puts us at roughly 1,000 days between now and then. So there's a lot of wood to chop, but we feel very, very good about the support we're getting from the FAA.

So sticking on the theme of certification and maybe a bit in the weeds, but what is the significance of being on the path to begin TIA flight testing in the next several months?

Yes. So Adam talked about this on the earnings call on Monday. One of the things that we are working through the FAA is just sort of getting kind of out of the policy phase. And so there's us and another industry peer that have our final airworthiness criteria published by the FAA a while back. And so that puts us in a place that we're -- that's allowed us to continue a lot of our R&D. And then where we are today is nobody is quite yet out of the policy phase. And so what we are working with the FAA on is sort of the final pieces to get out of that policy phase. What we also announced alongside that is that we are currently building 6 additional Midnight aircraft. 3 of those are in final assembly. And so the vision for those is some of those are going to go abroad, part of our Launch Edition program, which I think we'll talk about in a minute. And some of those will be retained at our Silicon Valley headquarters and our Salinas flight test facility, where we will push forward certification flight testing as we look towards TIA.

What are the remaining steps left before you complete vertical takeoff and landing piloted flights? I know you've done unpiloted flights on your conforming aircraft in the U.S. as well as the UAE later this year.

Yes. Well, here's how to think about sort of our flight testing and our fleet broadly. So last year, we completed over 400 flights. We sort of well exceeded our goal there. A large portion of those were VTOL transition wing-borne flights with Midnight. So for us, that was our first sort of opportunity to go out there and prove and test and validate our VTOL transition flight regime. At the same time, earlier this year, we announced our piloted flight regime. And we made the very intentional decision to do those CTOL, so conventional takeoff and landing with the runway at the outset. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is just as we approach TIA, the CTOL testing is a very critical part of TIA and those tests were things that we needed to go out and prove. And so we said, hey, let's go start our piloted flight regime with conventional takeoff. The other sort of reason was many of our customers, both civil and defense, demand conventional takeoff and landing as part of the certification of the aircraft. And that's because they look at CTOL's way to provide operational flexibility, increased levels of safety, et cetera. And so we said, hey, we're going to start our piloted flight regime here in the U.S. with CTOL. At the same time, we delivered our first aircraft to the UAE, and there we're focused on hot weather testing. And so to give you a little bit of context there, the UAE, when we were flying in July, temperatures reached about 110 degrees. That was just ambient. But then inside of the aircraft, many of the components actually got to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And so there's a lot of testing that needs to be done. Obviously, our aircraft was built and designed to withstand those conditions. You still want to get reps on the board, though.

Given that this year -- this conference is an autos-focused conference, I wanted to spend a little bit of time on the partnership with Stellantis, which is also a large shareholder. First, maybe the background of the program, I guess, how has the partnership been evolving? And I'll maybe ask a few more questions about the relationship as well.

Yes. Our partnership with Stellantis remains as strong as ever. The Chairman of both Stellantis and Ferrari, John Elkann has been an incredible supporter of the company. We were just with him recently. And so I think the partnership at this point is several years old and over that time, has matured in a wonderful way. One is Stellantis continued to invest in the company. You've seen that over our last several fundraisings. Two is we've really partnered with Stellantis on our manufacturing facility in a couple of different ways. One is just sort of physically. So there are dozens of full-time Stellantis employees at our Covington, Georgia facility working alongside us hand-in-hand as we sort of ramp up our manufacturing there. The second has really been more from an expertise perspective. Stellantis has decades of experience manufacturing high-value, low-cost vehicles all over the world. And so they have a lot of experience with a lot of the types of decisions that you face when you're sort of thinking about ramping up manufacturing. I'll give you an example. One of the questions that any manufacturer, whether it's in automotive or aviation, et cetera, has is when do you start automating different parts of the process. And so as a simple example, paint, you can paint an aircraft in 5 days or you can paint an aircraft in 5 hours if you've got sort of the right machinery and automation around it. And so the question is, is when do you go make the CapEx, CapEx investments to put in place things like automated paint. Do you do it on day 1? Or do you do it sort of when you're at a different point of the inflection curve. So that's just one of the many, many questions that we talk through with our partners, and they bring the judgment and the expertise to be able to help guide us through that decision-making.

I think part of what Adam talked about last year was especially in early stages, areas like working capital and things like that. Can you elaborate more on that? And the paint is a great example. Is there any other techniques that they're bringing to the table that otherwise wouldn't -- doesn't really even exist in the aerospace manufacturing world?

Yes. I think the financing of the working capital has been a big part of it. One of the things we've spoken about previously is an agreement that we have started to put in place around contract manufacturing and Stellantis providing us labor at our Georgia facility. And what that does, a few things. One is Stellantis has access to labor globally and sort of the right specialized skill sets that we're going to need both early and later on in the manufacturing process. And two is just from a financial perspective, it's advantageous to us as well because they will provide that labor and then we'll be able to remunerate them in the form of Archer shares. And so both of those are advantageous to us.

How many aircraft, I guess, do you expect to produce next year versus the 10 you're targeting to produce this year and maybe the path to scale along -- just staying in the same vein?

We haven't given specific guidance. Here's how I would think about it at a high level. There are sort of different points in the manufacturing ramp that -- where you hit different inflection points. So right now, we are in the phase of sort of those 6 concurrent builds that we spoke about earlier. The place we're trying to get to here in the near term is a run rate of about 50 aircraft a year, so call it 4 a month. That's the point where across our 2 facilities, we are sort of at steady state with about 4 aircraft a month. And then just to give you a broad picture of our facilities, we've got 2. So on the West Coast in Silicon Valley at our headquarters, we've got what we call our golden line. The way to think about that is our pilot manufacturing facility where you've got build, manufacturing, test, quality assurance and then flight test all in one place. The goal of that facility is to sort of ramp everything up, do what's called in the industry as new product introduction, make sure everything is working as intended and then use that blueprint as something you then go replicate at Georgia. At Georgia, we've got one of the largest aviation facilities in the world. That facility has been fully constructed. It's up and running. And so it's now at a place where we are starting to think about how you shift the bulk of that manufacturing from our golden line in Silicon Valley over to Georgia.

Maybe along those lines, it wasn't a question I had thought of, but this golden line, is this sort of like a copy exact or I mean, if you're thinking about the production part of the certification process, we've spoken about type certification a bit. How does that interact between San Jose and Georgia in terms of the production certification?

Yes, it's a good point. So our facility in Georgia, I think I mentioned earlier, it has a capacity to produce about 650 aircraft a year. And so what we're doing now is, to your question, the golden line in Silicon Valley is intended to basically get to a place where it can be a replicable carbon copy of the different lines that we're going to have in Georgia. And to your point around production certification, that's something that's been well underway since the beginning of the year. And so we are in a place where we have FAA inspectors doing quality and safety checks at both of our facilities. And so we'll have more to report there soon, but the process is well underway.

Great. We're going to break it for a question here in a bit, but I want to just kind of get a sense for when should we expect air taxi operations with your partners to begin ramping up. I guess, what's needed from a resource perspective, thinking about infrastructure, labor, pilots, maintenance and maybe also importantly, community engagement.

Yes. Well, maybe I'll start with talking about who our partners are. So globally, we've talked about a multibillion-dollar order book. Here in the U.S., we work with both United and with Southwest. With United, we've got up to $1.5 billion of orders. That's a partnership that's been in place since 2021. United has not only put down nonrefundable deposits against that order, they've also invested in the company several times. And so they're a phenomenal partner. And we think about -- we work with them very closely as we think about how we launch and scale here in the U.S. So markets we've talked about here domestically are New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. One of the major things is infrastructure. So there's, call it, 3 or 4 buckets of infrastructure that we've talked about publicly. The first is major airports. So places like LAX, like Newark, like San Francisco Airport, these are all airports that United is a very, very big user of. And so we think about not just where to take off and land, but really how to go build the seamless end-to-end experience. So if you're taking a Polaris business class flight from, call it, L.A. to New York, you land in Newark, how do we think about that Archer Midnight transfer to Manhattan being included as part of your journey? How do we think about making sure you have sort of a seamless transfer between your United wide-body airplane and your Archer Midnight so that when you land, you can be in Manhattan 10 to 15 minutes later. So that's sort of the domestic story. Internationally, we've got a number of partners all over the world, places like UAE, Japan, Korea, India and more. What we have structured is a program called Launch Edition. And so this was a way, given we had so many customers all over the world who want to test and learn eVTOL and want to be one of the first in the world to deploy air taxis. The UAE has been at the forefront of this. So Mubadala is an investor. IHC is an investor. It's the largest listed entity in the Middle East. And so several others sort of across the region. But given that partnership in the UAE, what we heard from the federal government was that they wanted to be the first in the world to commercialize air taxis. And so we've been working with them for the last couple of years, and we've done several things. One is a broad agreement with the government. So that's the Abu Dhabi Investment Office. We've spoken publicly about a framework agreement in the hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years where they are going to invest to go commercialize air taxis on things like infrastructure. We've also formed partnerships with the GCAA. So that's the federal regulator, the UAE equivalent of the FAA, where they have charted a pathway for us to commercialize early in the region. And then on the commercial side, Abu Dhabi Aviation is our big partner there. So Abu Dhabi Aviation is the largest helicopter operator in the Middle East. And we have formed that Launch agreement -- well, Launch Edition agreement with them where we can expect to receive tens of millions of dollars over the next 18 to 24 months. Some of those payments will hit in the second half of this year. And under that agreement, what we plan to do is deliver additional Midnight aircraft and start ramping up our flights in the region. In parallel to that, it's go ready the infrastructure. And then it's also sort of set up all of the pieces that Abu Dhabi Aviation needs to operate at scale. So pilot training, maintenance, customer service, things like that.

Great. Any questions from the audience? All right. Maybe picking up on one of the things you said about infrastructure, and we've seen one of the competitors in the space basically looking to buy BLADE, their operations. And while it doesn't mean exclusivity, they do have actual physical infrastructure, things like lounges and things like that. If I was to think about a use case like Newark to downtown, maybe downtown is not a good example, like West 30th, like where there is somebody else's infrastructure, can you use that? Or how would you use that? Do you need a partner? Do you need somebody else to build a lounge or build some kind of Archer facility? How does that work out?

Yes. Look, that's a deal we looked at several times. It wasn't the right deal for us. Congratulations to Rob and BLADE. I've known them for quite a while. The way that we think about New York is -- and we've been fairly public about a lot of the infrastructure we've built out here and the deals we've built out here. One thing to remember is all the infrastructure here within Manhattan is fully publicly accessible. So you've got 3 heliports. You have downtown Manhattan, West 30th and East 34th. Those are some of the largest heliports in the country, and they are all by law sort of owned by the city or the state. Downtown and East side are owned by the EDC, the Economic Development Corporation -- Council of New York City. And then the West side is owned by the Hudson River Park Trust, which is a city state entity here in New York. So they're all publicly owned. They have private operating agreements and we have partnerships with all of them. So we've talked about this publicly. There's actually plenty of space there to go install lounge facilities. In fact, several years ago, when I was at Uber, my team launched a service called Uber Copter where we worked with the Premier Part 135 here in the region. We also established lounges, so a Premier lounge at Downtown Manhattan. And that was fairly straightforward to do, working with the operators. There's a bunch of operators that have those lounge facilities, and we would expect to have those as well. There's also a number of FBOs in the region, so places like Westchester, Teterboro on Long Island that we've talked about. And then, of course, the big airports, Newark, JFK and LaGuardia.

You spoke earlier about the Launch Edition. Maybe you could kind of double-click on some of that. So I guess, how is this route maybe potentially more favorable than waiting for official certification? Will the Launch Edition customers receive conforming aircraft that you intend to certify with the FAA? I'm just trying to get a sense for the strategy here in a little bit more detail.

I mean the strategy is to launch, right? There are so many places in the world where the governments and our operating customers are very, very leaned in, and they're saying to us, hey, we want a pathway to test and learn eVTOL. So the goal is not to go deploy a large number of aircraft in any one place too early, but it's really to start testing and learning with aircraft that we believe are safe and that meet sort of the FAA rule set. And so let's take the UAE as an example. What the GCA has said to us is, hey, now that your FAA airworthiness criteria is published, we have a very clear idea of what the rule set is, let us chart a pathway for you to have an expedited path to launch here in the UAE and start doing flights. And what that does is it forces the entire ecosystem to get it and come together. It forces the infrastructure to be ready. It forces the GCA to really, really understand the aircraft and the operations and it forces the commercial partners to sort of ramp up their operational prowess so that if and when we are ready to launch at scale and sort of bring a large order of aircraft, the whole system is working. It's not too dissimilar from the executive order in June, where the mandate at a federal level was to sort of set up the same thing here in multiple geographies. And so that's how I would think about it. And so the goal -- the demand that we are seeing is across dozens of countries all over the world. The 3 that we've announced so far are the UAE, Ethiopia, which is one of the largest Star Alliance partners. It's the largest carrier in Africa. And then Indonesia, which if you've ever been to places like Jakarta or Bali are really struggling with the limited bandwidth of their ground transportation networks.

So you spoke just now just a little bit on the demand. What -- and probably this will just depend on what the company is able to build and also as well as strategy, but what could a revenue opportunity look like this year, next and even beyond for some kind of Launch Edition? Just trying to get a sense of like this business mix towards more aircraft sales for the foreseeable future.

Yes. Well, I'll talk about first sort of what one of these agreements look like. So what any one of these agreements looks like is sort of low tens of millions of dollars over a period of 18 to 24 months. And they're sort of payments that start at the delivery of the first aircraft and sort of sustain throughout that 18- to 24-month period. As I said, we have 3 of these that we've announced, UAE, Ethiopia and India. We've talked about sort of how many aircraft we're building. So we haven't given specific guidance beyond that, but we do have demand across a lot of countries. What we look for is governments that are leaned in, a commercial reputable operating partner there in the country, the infrastructure readiness and sort of putting all those things together, if it makes for an attractive market, then it has the potential to become a Launch Edition market that we're excited about.

Okay. I want to pivot to defense, which has become pretty topical in the industry. So I guess, how would you characterize more broadly eVTOL's role in the U.S. defense space? Where is there a clear need for the technology?

One of the things Adam spoke about on the earnings call is if you look empirically over the last 100 years, basically, every major world conflict has been largely shaped by some advancement in technology, usually in aviation. If you go back to World War II and the fighter jet or the war on terror and drones and then even to the current war in the Ukraine and how first-person drones have really sort of commanded the narrative, technology and aviation have been a major part of every one of those conflicts. What we hear from the generals and the folks that we speak with is that the next global conflict will largely be shaped by vertical lift. But today, the incumbent technology is like 1960s and 1970s, Chinooks and Black Hawks. And those have several issues. One is they're tremendously expensive. We're talking about systems that are in the tens of millions of dollars. They have very high both acoustic and thermal signatures, and they're human piloted. So they put human pilots at risk. And it's simply a technology that we don't think will scale or is ready for the next global conflict. And this is what we continue to hear from defense organizations all over the world. And so as we have engaged those governments and customers with Archer Defense, one of the things that we continue hearing is that there is an increased level of demand for this technology. And then what we sort of announced at Archer Defense was an exclusive partnership to build hybrid electric VTOL. And one of the things that we have heard from our customers repeatedly is the first instinct, which might be to go put a hybrid powertrain on our existing civil eVTOL solution is insufficient. That will give you more range, but it doesn't meet all of the other performance criteria that the military customers are looking for. What they have pretty much demanded is that we create a purpose-built aircraft for many of the specifications that they're looking for, things like range, things like payload and other capabilities. And so that's what we're doing now. And as I said, we've got a lot of demand for that across several companies around the world -- countries around the world.

Sure. I think Adam spoke to the defense potentially even being a bigger market opportunity, I'll call it, the nearest term. I don't -- you can correct me if I'm wrong. But I guess when should we think about the team being able to capitalize on the opportunity set you went with a hybrid VTOL, defense product be ready to commercial -- I guess, bring to market?

Yes. Look, as you know, we can't share much yet. There are a couple of things I'll say. One is we announced earlier last week that we've made 2 acquisitions in the space. That was, I think, a symbol of the investment we're making and how bullish we are on the opportunity. The first was MCC, Mission Critical Composites. It's a composite factory in Southern California. What that does is it allows us to sort of ramp up our iteration speed as we think about the new aircraft and really do some of the building and prototyping much more quickly. The second was Overair, which is a spin-off of Karem. Karem was founded by Ab Karem, the sort of godfather of drones and the inventor of the predator drone. They bring a lot of IP and critical talent that's really important for what we're building. So both of those, I think, were symbols of the investment that we're making. In terms of how you can expect to see it at Archer, it's really hard to say. These programs are very, very large in size. We're talking about multibillion-dollar programs of record. But as you know and I think as you've seen empirically, they go slow and then they go fast. And so it's hard to say what that would look like from a revenue mix perspective. I think it will be lumpy. But the good news is these customers are very real, very leaned in. And as I said, the size of the prize is pretty large.

Yes. How fungible is the tech and also, I guess, the internal investments that you're making between the current sort of battery eVTOL programs and the hybrid eVTOL aircraft designs?

Well, you have to think about what are the pieces that are really important to the customer. The big one is low acoustic and thermal signature. So the electric powertrain that we've built in-house. That's our bread and butter. We've got over 100 engineers from SpaceX, Tesla, Apple, et cetera, that have built, what I believe to be one of the world's best powertrain for aviation. So that powertrain that we are using on the Archer Midnight is going to be very, very critical for the defense vehicle, especially to meet the performance criteria, the low acoustic signature, the low thermal signature that folks are looking for. And then a bunch of the propulsion technology as well, I think, is going to really come into play. So the important bits, I think, are very much reusable. And that is ultimately why we had -- why we felt Archer Defense was on mission and it's something that we were uniquely positioned to do.

Just want to pause again and see if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. Okay. Defense has evolved a bit, right? So with the pullback of Agility Prime, how should we think about the current level of engagement with the DoD, various departments and so forth?

Agility Prime was a phenomenal way to kickstart the program. It was a really great way to get the U.S. Air Force to start looking at these technologies and for the public at large to start associating eVTOL with defense. So it's a phenomenal program. I think us and our peers really benefited from it. It was very much a research program. And so it's very much a way to evaluate the technology, and it's certainly not on a pathway to a program of record. And so I think it was the right program for the right time. What we're looking at now, though, is how do you actually go in a program of record with sort of allied defense programs around the world. And so I'd say we're sort of on to the next phase, and that's where it goes back to a purpose-built vehicle for the specifications for what most around the world believe to be the next global conflict, and that's what we're sort of focused on. And I think that the interest level there is higher than ever. Adam and I were recently with Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense. And the perspective from his end sort of resounded with kind of the bullishness of how important this is for the defense industry moving forward.

So the company recently raised an additional $850 million to support defense development, among others, really just bolster the balance sheet. But how far do you think your current cash balance takes you? Are there other avenues that you have to offset some of the spending that we'd assume to be pretty high level over the next few years?

Look, we're grateful to have roughly $1.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents. So from a liquidity perspective, that balance sheet puts us from our perspective at the lead of the industry. So if you look at the last quarter, we talked about, I think, roughly $119 million. And so from a runway perspective, we haven't given any guidance, but we're very comfortable with the cash position, and that allows us to stay heads down and execute.

So I guess we're kind of getting close to the end here. But I guess what other sort of closing remarks would you like to wrap up? I guess, maybe any particular milestones that investors should watch out for this year or maybe any discussions you've had with investors that maybe things that are just sort of misunderstood about the story?

I think the headline for us, as we've talked to investors this week has really been around manufacturing. I think the investments we're making there are indicative of, one, the demand we're seeing; two, the regulatory embrace that we're getting, not just here in the U.S. but abroad. And then three, is the maturation of our manufacturing processes in our facilities. We're at a place where our Georgia facility is fully constructed and up and running and I think far ahead of the industry. And then we're at a place where in Silicon Valley, our golden line is very mature, and it puts us in a place where we can have 6 aircraft that we're concurrently building. And that gets us to a Midnight fleet that's very robust. It's going to allow us to deploy aircraft internationally for payments from international customers and then here domestically, including in cities as soon as next year. So we're excited about where we're at, and we're excited to share more next quarter.

Great. If there's no further questions, we can go ahead wrap up the session. But Nikhil, I appreciate you coming to our Auto Conference again for the first time. It's pretty enlightening for us. So I appreciate that, and good luck for the rest of your meetings today and in general for the company moving forward.

Always fun, Bill. Thanks for having me.

Thanks.