Tiny planes are truly having their moment. On Thursday, VTOL giant Archer Aviation went on a shopping spree—snapping up a manufacturing facility and assets, plus another VTOL maker’s patent portfolio—to speed development of its next-gen defense aircraft.
Tiny plane, big impact: In case you don’t know, Archer was founded in California in 2018 by Adam Goldstein and Brett Adcock and has led the charge on runway-less aviation. The company went public in 2021 and now has an eye-watering market cap of $6.16B.
And the money keeps on coming: Following an executive order in June that speeds up eVTOL deployment, they secured an additional $850M in funding, bringing total pro forma liquidity to $2B. Sounds a lot like investors are making a big bet on traffic moving from the ground to the sky.
Chasing defense dollars: While their electric air taxi side of the business has some big commercial buyers and backers (everyone hates traffic), the company has jumped headfirst into defense. That’s a good call, given that the FY2026 draft NDAA calls for $13.4B for autonomous systems, including $9.4B for unmanned and remotely operated aerial vehicles.
Archer launched a defense-specific unit last December, which the company’s institutional investors backed with $450M in December and another $300M in February. The company also inked a deal with Anduril to jointly build a hybrid-propulsion military VTOL aircraft, targeting a potential DoD program of record down the line.
Archer’s two new acquisitions should help build out the defense business further.
- Overair: A spin-off of Karem Aircraft, which makes advanced fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft with high-efficiency tiltrotors (vertical-to-horizontal VTOL). Archer bought Overair’s patent portfolio and brought its core employees on board.
- Mission Critical Composites: A California-based specialized defense composite manufacturer. Archer snapped up the company’s key composite manufacturing assets and a roughly 60,000 square foot manufacturing facility.
Overair’s portfolio (and people) will help Archer meet the “growing demand from major allied defense programs worldwide,” the company said in a statement. MCC’s manufacturing assets and big new space, meanwhile, will “allow Archer to bring core composite fabrication capabilities in-house,” which will boost rapid prototyping and iteration for its defense program.
With these buys, hitting that VTOL program of record target is within reach. As Goldstein said in February after the $300M raise, “I believe the opportunity for advanced vertical lift aircraft across defense appears to be substantially larger than I originally expected.” It’s only a matter of time before we see how big it really is.