Archer Aviation
eVTOL air taxi developer building the electric Midnight aircraft for urban air mobility
Wikipedia — Archer AviationArcher Aviation Inc. is a publicly traded company headquartered in San Jose, California, developing eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft. It trades on the NYSE under the ticker ACHR and was founded on 16 October 2018 by Adam Goldstein and Brett Adcock. Its leadership includes Adam Goldstein (CEO), Tom Muniz (COO), and Geoff Bower (CFO), and the company reported roughly 900 employees as of 2025.
Archer's production aircraft, named Midnight, is designed to transport people in and around cities as an air taxi service, with a claimed range of up to 100 miles (160 km) at speeds up to 150 mph (240 km/h). Midnight is designed to be safe, sustainable, and quiet, carrying four passengers plus a pilot with an expected payload of over 1,000 pounds. It is optimized for back-to-back short trips of around 20 miles with about a 10-minute charging time between flights, and evolved from Archer's demonstrator aircraft, Maker, which validated its proprietary "12 tilt 6" configuration.
United Airlines is Archer's first major corporate partner, having ordered two hundred aircraft. The company has worked to certify Midnight with the FAA and intends to use it as part of its urban air mobility (UAM) network. As an early-stage, pre-revenue company, Archer reported $0 revenue and a net loss of $317.3 million for 2023, with total assets of $578.3 million.
As an aircraft developer in a nascent and technology-intensive sector, Archer is highly relevant to innovation: its business depends on advances in electric propulsion, battery charging, autonomy, certification processes, and air-taxi network operations.
Ideas that could help Archer Aviation
- VertiSite
A SaaS planning tool that ranks and optimizes vertiport locations and network density for any city, using a city-centric demand model tied to ticket price and accessibility scenarios.
Why it helps: Identified as a potential customer for this idea.
- High-Density UAM Propulsion Thermal Management Kit
A specialized cooling and conductor upgrade kit designed to increase the power density and efficiency of electric UAM motors.
Why it helps: To meet strict regulatory requirements for safety and performance in urban environments.
- High-Density UAM Propulsion Cooling Kits
Specialized thermal management hardware designed to increase the power density and efficiency of electric motors in air taxis.
Why it helps: Increasing motor efficiency directly reduces the energy cost per flight, helping them reach the low ticket price targets required for city-wide adoption.
- AeroPropulsion Spec Bridge — Aerodynamic-to-Motor Design Translation Tool
A software tool that takes propeller/rotor aerodynamic requirements as input and automatically generates electric motor design specifications, closing the engineering gap between aerodynamics and electrical machine design teams in eVTOL development.
Why it helps: Archer's Midnight aircraft requires tightly integrated propulsion design; automating the aero-to-motor translation would compress their development schedule.