Archer Aviation signed a definitive equity purchase agreement with Boeing on 9 August to acquire Wisk Aero, SkyGrid and Insitu, together with Insitu Pacific and Boeing Emirates1. Boeing takes 19.75 per cent of Archer's Class A shares outstanding at closing, plus a warrant, an option to buy shares at a fixed price, covering $100 million of stock at $13.00 a share and exercisable between 12 and 36 months after completion. A second warrant appears in the agreement, but its terms were not in the extract filed, so the full dilution to Archer's existing shareholders cannot be calculated from the public record.
Insitu built the ScanEagle and the Integrator, the small catapult-launched aircraft that carried Western tactical reconnaissance through two decades of expeditionary war, and Boeing has owned the company since 2008. Selling it for paper in an air-taxi developer, in the same weeks that federal lending is pointed at new American component plants, runs against the direction of every other transaction in this briefing.
The Air Force shut Boeing out of its collaborative combat aircraft production award in June, handing the work to Anduril and General Atomics. Two months on, the company has chosen to hold uncrewed manufacturing as somebody else's upside rather than its own production line. Its exposure to military drones now tracks Archer's share price instead of an order book, which is a lighter position to carry and a harder one to influence.
Archer entered July partnering opportunistically on defence work through the Thunder tiltrotor with Anduril. It leaves August owning an established uncrewed-aircraft manufacturer, an autonomy stack and an airspace-management platform outright. Whether antitrust reviewers read a near-20 per cent Boeing holding in the buyer as a divestment or as a repositioning is the question the closing will settle.
