Boeing Is Selling Its Air Taxi and Drone Businesses to Archer Aviation

On August 10, 2026, Archer Aviation and Boeing announced that Archer will acquire three Boeing subsidiaries: eVTOL air taxi developer Wisk Aero, drone maker Insitu, and airspace software firm SkyGrid. In exchange, Boeing will become one of Archer’s largest shareholders instead of owning the businesses outright.

The deal is structured as an all-stock transaction. Boeing will end up with close to a 20 percent equity stake in Archer, plus warrants to buy up to $200 million more stock later, according to AeroTime, which reviewed Archer’s SEC filing on the transaction.

Boeing also gets the right to nominate a director to Archer’s board, and has agreed to invest up to $55 million in an upcoming Archer funding round.

What Boeing is actually selling

Boeing built or bought each of these three businesses for a different reason, and none of them build airliners. Wisk designs electric air taxis meant to fly themselves, with no pilot on board, and has flown six generations of prototypes across more than 1,700 test flights.

SkyGrid builds the ground-based software that would manage traffic for large numbers of automated aircraft sharing the same airspace.

Insitu is the outlier: a maker of small uncrewed surveillance aircraft for military and government customers in 35 countries, with more than 3,500 systems delivered and over $200 million in annual revenue. Combined, the three units carry nearly two million flight hours of institutional experience.

Why Boeing is stepping back instead of building it alone

Boeing is not walking away from autonomous flight, it is changing how it holds exposure to it. Under the deal, Boeing keeps a cross-licensing agreement letting it use Wisk’s autonomous flight-control technology on its own future commercial and defense aircraft, according to The Air Current.

That matters because Boeing is already working on autonomy for military platforms like the MQ-28 Ghost Bat loyal wingman drone, so the technology does not simply leave the building.

What Boeing sheds is the cost of running three capital-intensive, pre-revenue programs through certification while its own commercial airplane business works through well-documented production and cash problems. Trading three cost centers for an equity stake, a board seat, and a technology license keeps a claim on the eVTOL upside without carrying the bill alone.

Archer still has to certify and deliver its own eVTOL air taxi, called Midnight, before any of this pays off commercially. Buying Wisk brings in a rival’s engineering team and years of autonomy testing rather than starting that work from scratch, and Insitu’s cash flow helps fund it in the meantime.

Archer founder and CEO Adam Goldstein called it “a watershed moment for Archer and the future of physical AI in aerospace and defense.” Boeing product development lead Brian Yutko described it more simply as “a win-win for Boeing and Archer.”