Air Taxi Developer Archer Seeks $1 Billion From Rival Wisk

Air taxi eVTOL developer Archer Aviation is seeking $1 billion in damages from rival Wisk Aero, escalating an ongoing dispute over allegations of trade secret theft.

It’s the latest in a series of legal challenges between the two companies. In April, Wisk sued Archer, claiming that former employees took a number of proprietary documents—including aircraft, component, and system designs to manufacture and test data—with them when they left Wisk to work at Archer.

Archer has denied the claims, and in July, Archer attorney Eric Lentell said, “Wisk’s charges of massive theft are based entirely on conspiracy theories and outright misrepresentations of the actual record.”

In court records filed Tuesday, attorneys for California-based Archer argued that Wisk, also located in California, has “deployed a knowingly false extra-judicial smear campaign that projected stand-alone defamatory statements about Archer to the world.”

In doing so, they said, the company has caused more than $1 billion in damages to Archer.

A Wisk spokesperson told Reuters: “Archer’s counterclaim is ludicrous and its troubles are purely self-inflicted.”

Archer plans to create the world’s first all-electric airline and has already secured orders for regional electric airliners from United Airlines and plans to launch in 2024, while Wisk is a joint venture between Boeing and Kitty Hawk and financed by Google co-founder Larry Page.