Archer pays for Wisk in its own stock, and Boeing walks away with 16.5%

Archer Aviation announced this week that it owns Wisk Aero, the rival that sued it in 2021 over what Wisk called the "brazen theft" of confidential information and intellectual property ^[1][2]. Boeing agreed to sell Wisk and two other subsidiaries to Archer in exchange for an ownership stake, and Boeing now holds 16.5% of Archer ^[3][4].

The other two subsidiaries are the interesting part. SkyGrid is a digital airspace and air traffic management software company, and Insitu is a drone maker ^[5][6]. Neither is waiting on an air taxi type certificate to have a product. TechCrunch's read is that the week's deals show a sector that keeps consolidating and hunting near-term revenue while the long regulatory process grinds on ^[7], and the composition of this basket supports that read.

Note how it was paid for. Archer did not write a cheque; it issued equity, which leaves existing holders with 83.5% of the company they had before ^[8]. That is a large slug of ownership for assets whose value TechCrunch's account does not put a number on ^[9]. It also installs Boeing, the counterparty that owned the plaintiff, as a substantial shareholder in the defendant ^[4].

The litigation history is worth restating because it sets the ceiling on how surprising this should be. Wisk's 2021 suit ran two years, and the settlement ended both it and Archer's countersuit seeking $1 billion in damages, then produced a collaboration between the two ^[2][10]. The acquisition is the third act of a deal that already turned adversaries into partners.

Wisk itself is a survivor of an earlier round of attrition. It began as Kitty Hawk, the electric aviation startup led by Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Alphabet's X, and backed by Google co-founder Larry Page ^[11]. Kitty Hawk shut down in September 2022, but its Cora program had spun into a joint venture with Boeing, which was renamed Wisk Aero ^[12].

The same week, Joby Aviation bought Resonant Sciences for $500 million and made it a dedicated defense unit called Joby Defense ^[13][14]. Resonant makes radio frequency and sensor systems ^[15]. Joby has been expanding into defense for a couple of years and says it is sticking with its air taxi mission while seeing opportunity, and revenue, in defense ^[16]. Two of the sector's most-watched developers, in one week, both bought businesses that can invoice before certification arrives.

What to watch: whether SkyGrid and Insitu show up as reported revenue lines in Archer's results, or as costs absorbed into an aircraft program that still has to be certified. Watch what a 16.5% holder asks for in return ^[4], particularly on airspace software and defense work, which is where Boeing's interests and Archer's new assets overlap. And watch whether Joby's defense unit stays a unit or starts setting the roadmap ^[14], because the honest version of the near-term revenue argument is that it changes what these companies are optimising for.