βWe've agreed with the FAA on every detail of the design, not just testing. The FAA designated engineering representatives have signed off on each of those drawings before we start making them. Then the full aircraft comes together and we now begin flying it. First step is Joby pilots fly that aircraft... [Commercial rides begin] as soon as the end of this year.β
Drones are evolving into flying agentic AI systems
βFrom a product perspective, I think the course that we're charting is towards our drones being like flying agentic AI, just like you have an agent that you interact with on your computer or in the cloud, this thing is an agent that can move and do more for you in the physical world and you should interact with it in similar ways. Like it should have the intelligence and domain expertise to be useful to you in that way.β
Secure supply chains require independence from China
βA year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government. And it was a pretty aggressive action. They announced the sanctions, and then they showed up at the suppliers that we still had in China, shut them down, stop them from doing business with us, really tried to kill us. So that was a fun adventure for our supply chain team. They've done incredible work, and we've been able to maintain supply. And I think the good news piece of this is that we now have by far the most secure drone supply chain in the world, independent from China.β
βYeah, so we're very excited to be announcing our Series F. This was $110 million fundraise, $4.4 billion post-money valuation led by insider investors. And I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. It's a testament to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling.β
Air travel could become 10-15x cheaper per passenger mile
βSo air air travel today is our lowest cost, highest speed, and safest motor transport. So it's, it it's hundreds of times safer or even thousands of times safer than driving. It is, you know, more than 10 times faster, and, it's it's on the order of an order of magnitude less expensive per passenger mile.β
AI is making top aerodynamicists 10x more productive
βOur chief aerodynamicist was absolutely giddy. I was talking to him, just just a few hours ago, and he's like, he he can't sleep because of how excited he is about how performant these new models are, where there have been project after project after project that he even though he runs a huge team, that he hasn't had resources to go and conquer those projects for years. So he's got this whole stack of ideas and opportunities. He's he's now able to build, in, an afternoon what would have previously taken him weeks or months. He's like, I'm 10 x 10 x as productive as I was just a few months ago.β
βThe number one constraint we're facing right now is building more drones faster. The demand for these products has really just exploded over the last couple of years. We a couple of weeks ago announced a $50 million, 3,000 drone order from the US Army. That size of contract is actually not that much of an outlier for us these days. So it's a good problem to have, but we will be tripling production over the course of this year.β
βI think a default expectation in five years is if there's an emergency, you call 911, a drone shows up in a few seconds, and that's going to be everywhere in the US, hopefully everywhere in the world. And that's going to change the way policing works. It's going to get better outcomes, you're going to have fewer officer involved shootings, faster response times. And I think you can also do that while protecting privacy and transparency. Like these things are essentially flying body cameras.β
Joby aircraft are 100x quieter than helicopters with layered redundancy
βAnd we have six propulsion stations, and each of those propulsion stations is driven by two separate motors, two separate battery packs. So it's layer on layer redundancy across all the systems in the aircraft.β
βThe number one constraint we're facing right now is building more drones faster. The demand for these products has really just exploded over the last couple of years. We a couple of weeks ago announced a $50 million, 3,000 drone order from the US Army. That size of contract is actually not that much of an outlier for us these days. So it's a good problem to have, but we will be tripling production over the course of this year.β
Drones are evolving into flying agentic AI systems
βFrom a product perspective, I think the course that we're charting is towards our drones being like flying agentic AI, just like you have an agent that you interact with on your computer or in the cloud, this thing is an agent that can move and do more for you in the physical world and you should interact with it in similar ways. Like it should have the intelligence and domain expertise to be useful to you in that way.β
AI increases engineering productivity by ten times
βI think it's really important to talk about what a game changer AI is. You take one of the greatest aerodynamic minds on the planet and you enable him with something that makes him 10x as productive. The benefits compound in a crazy way. This is the most profound technology, I think, in the history of humanity.β
Secure supply chains require independence from China
βA year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government. And it was a pretty aggressive action. They announced the sanctions, and then they showed up at the suppliers that we still had in China, shut them down, stop them from doing business with us, really tried to kill us. So that was a fun adventure for our supply chain team. They've done incredible work, and we've been able to maintain supply. And I think the good news piece of this is that we now have by far the most secure drone supply chain in the world, independent from China.β
Leaders must maintain high-level technical engineering expertise
βI think one of the things that was certainly true at Apple then is just this insistence on their leaders being exceptional engineers themselves. I remember a conversation that made a big impression on me. I was talking to one of our advisors who was a key senior executive at Apple at the time of like, how do you think about prioritizing sort of like management and leadership skills versus technical ability? And he just said, you need both. Like, you can't compromise. The best people are able to do both.β
Capital needs are decreasing despite rapid scaling
βI really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. And it's a testament, I think, to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling and even make more and more aggressive bets in building new products.β
Joby aircraft are 100 times quieter than helicopters
βAt the core, this is an electric aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter, but it has a wing. And so it can transition and fly on that wing that makes it more efficient and it makes it quieter. The acoustics are critical to what we're trying to build. We want a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that you can land as close to the communities that you're looking to serve.β
βAs you want to scale from hundreds in a community to thousands and then tens of thousands, you really want to do that with autonomy. I think this is another area where the administration and the FAA, the DOT are really leaning in to look at how do we make our airspace safer and how do we increase the capacity of it.β
βSo Ohio is, has an incredible aviation workforce, dates back to the Wright brothers. It's one of the best, places for, aviation talent anywhere in the world, and, we've been scaling our team and been really impressed by the caliber of of team members we're we've been able to add. We doubled down and added an additional 730,000 square feet of manufacturing space that we closed on recently.β
Toyota partnership unlocks manufacturing at massive scale
βThat that is one of the the reasons why having Toyota at our sides is so vitally important is that Toyota manufactures 10,000,000 cars a year. And they are one of the best companies in the world when it comes to manufacturing with incredible quality at massive scale. And so, the aircraft that we have, it it like, we're as we get this thing certified, it's gonna be time to turn the key and, and ramp up manufacturing to real scale.β
Capital needs are decreasing despite rapid scaling
βI really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. And it's a testament, I think, to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling and even make more and more aggressive bets in building new products.β
βYeah, so we're very excited to be announcing our Series F. This was $110 million fundraise, $4.4 billion post-money valuation led by insider investors. And I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. It's a testament to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling.β
Joby air taxi rides arrive in 12 states by end of 2026
βThe winners of that were announced. There were, seven seven, consortiums that were selected as winners. Joby was part of five of those. And so there's going to be 12 states, across the country where we're gonna be able to test these next generation technologies, both on our air taxi, on SuperPilot, and on our advanced propulsion systems.β
China is racing to scale thousands of aircraft per year
βA a few weeks ago, I was in China, and I saw firsthand how fast they're moving. And it is essential that, we continue to lead on a technological standpoint. We we have incredible technology. We have incredible engineers. We have AI, and that is 10 x ing those incredible engineers. We need to deliver on the manufacturing side. They are in China, I saw production facilities that are scaling for thousands of aircraft per year.β
Hydrogen fuel cells deliver 6x energy advantage over jet fuel
βAnd we think that that hydrogen is a game changer across the the aviation ecosystem. It's three times the specific energy of jet fuel. And with fuel cells, we can convert that into propulsion twice as efficiently.β
βNow we're in a position to use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases. And that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of dangerous work happens indoors. It's where the fixed wing drone that can cover much longer ranges comes into play. And it's a very exciting, fun time to basically take these mature technology building blocks to be able to pretty quickly assemble them into a fundamentally new capability.β
Toyota partnership enables rapid manufacturing scale
βToyota is one of our most significant investors. And we chose Toyota early on, one, because the Toyota family has dreamt about building aircraft for daily transportation, dating all the way back to the 1930s. Two, Toyota is known around the world for the quality and the reliability with which they build.β
Texas only requires landowner permission for Joby landings
βYeah. It's super flexible. And one of the incredible things, like, as I talked about with Texas, Texas is one of the places that's that's super flexible. All you need is the the permission of the landowner.β
βNow we're in a position to use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases. And that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of dangerous work happens indoors. It's where the fixed wing drone that can cover much longer ranges comes into play. And it's a very exciting, fun time to basically take these mature technology building blocks to be able to pretty quickly assemble them into a fundamentally new capability.β
βI think a default expectation in five years is if there's an emergency, you call 911, a drone shows up in a few seconds, and that's going to be everywhere in the US, hopefully everywhere in the world. And that's going to change the way policing works. It's going to get better outcomes, you're going to have fewer officer involved shootings, faster response times. And I think you can also do that while protecting privacy and transparency. Like these things are essentially flying body cameras.β
Leaders must maintain high-level technical engineering expertise
βI think one of the things that was certainly true at Apple then is just this insistence on their leaders being exceptional engineers themselves. I remember a conversation that made a big impression on me. I was talking to one of our advisors who was a key senior executive at Apple at the time of like, how do you think about prioritizing sort of like management and leadership skills versus technical ability? And he just said, you need both. Like, you can't compromise. The best people are able to do both.β