Archer Aviation acquires former rival Wisk Aero from Boeing

Electric aircraft company Archer Aviation now owns its former rival, Wisk Aero, three years after the two companies settled a trade-secret lawsuit. Under the terms of the deal, Boeing has agreed to sell Wisk Aero and two other subsidiaries — SkyGrid, a digital airspace and air-traffic-management software company, and drone maker Insitu — to Archer in exchange for an ownership stake, according to a regulatory filing released Monday.

Boeing will receive newly issued Archer shares equal to 19.75% of Archer’s shares outstanding immediately before closing, resulting in about a 16.5% stake in the company after the deal, according to the filing and a person familiar with the matter.

The acquisition caps a once-embittered relationship between the two electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft developers. In April 2021, Wisk sued Archer for “brazen theft” of confidential information and intellectual property. The legal fight lasted two years before the companies reached a settlement that ended the lawsuit — along with Archer’s counter-suit seeking $1 billion in damages — and launched a new collaboration. Under that settlement, Archer agreed to make Wisk its exclusive provider of autonomous technology and gave Wisk the option to purchase up to 13,176,636 shares of common stock at $0.01 per share.

Wisk traces back to Kittyhawk, an electric-aviation startup led by Sebastian Thrun, who co-founded Alphabet’s moonshot lab X, and backed by Google co-founder Larry Page. Kittyhawk shut down in September 2022. Its Cora program — a two-person, autonomous flying taxi — had already been spun off in late 2019 into a joint venture with Boeing, renamed Wisk, to develop electric, self-flying air taxis. Boeing invested another $450 million in Wisk in early 2022, and by 2023 Wisk was a fully owned Boeing subsidiary.

Archer, a California-based startup founded in 2018, has meanwhile expanded its eVTOL program beyond its original air-taxi network plan. It moved into the defense sector a couple of years ago, raising a $430 million round in December 2024 to fund its Archer Defense program, followed by another $300 million from institutional investors including BlackRock and Wellington in 2025. Archer also struck an exclusive deal with Anduril to jointly develop a hybrid gas-and-electric VTOL aircraft for defense applications. The company, which went public in 2021 through a merger with a blank-check company, continues developing its all-electric Midnight aircraft; earlier this month it completed a piloted round-trip flight between Salinas Municipal Airport and Monterey Regional Airport as it prepares to begin operations later this year under the White House’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program.

Why it matters

Folding a former rival’s autonomous-flight technology, air-traffic software, and drone manufacturing into one company gives Archer a broader technology base as it races to commercialize air taxis, while handing Boeing an equity stake in a competitor instead of a struggling subsidiary.