Joby Aviation: Changing Air Transportation Forever

Today’s spotlight is on Joby Aviation. Started in 2009 in Santa Cruz, California, Joby Aviation has developed an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and built a vertically integrated design, manufacturing, and operations business.

It’s pre-revenue today, but aims to get FAA clearance for commercial operations early in 2026 and will operate in Dubai around the same time.

Why Joby Aviation? In ~100 Words

What if a helicopter with the range of a private jet was available on the Uber app for the cost of a commercial airline ticket?

That Joby Aviation.

The options for flying have been relatively stagnant for decades with commercial airliners mass transporting people around the world, private jets serving the ultra-wealthy, and helicopters filling a niche for (very expensive) short point-to-point travel.

The opportunity for Joby is in relatively short flights from convenient vertiports (equivalent to common helipads) and on-demand flights from the Uber or Joby Aviation app. This could be “Uber for the skies”, transporting customers to and from relatively inexpensive and highly accessible vertiports around the world.

Joby Aviation = Uber + Netjets + Blade

This could change how we think about traveling across town during rush hour or to a city or vacation a few hours drive away. And that could be a market bigger than commercial air travel is today!

Key Stats

Joby Aviation by the numbers:

• Company: Joby Aviation

• Ticker: JOBY

• Market Cap: $5.2 billion

• Revenue (ttm): $0.1 million

• Gross Margin: -87%

• Operating Margin: n/a

• Net Income: -$608 million

• Shares Outstanding: 699.8 million

• Earnings per share: -$0.87

• FCF (ttm): -$477 million

• Date Founded: 2009

• Founder: JoeBen Bevirt

Joby Aviation’s Leadership:

• Founder and CEO: Since the start of the company in 2009, JoeBen Bevirt has been at the helm of the company. He’s a longtime entrepreneur and visionary in the eVTOL space.

The Strategy

Joby Aviation is a vertically integrated company, designing, manufacturing, and (eventually) operating eVTOL aircraft for its operations.

What’s intriguing about eVTOLs is the potential for the aircraft to be lower cost, quieter, and more accessible than private jets or helicopters, potentially opening up a large addressable market of short and medium distance flights. The two images below attempt to outline how I see the industry’s potential.

Joby has the potential to have a lower cost per mile than a helicopter — its closest parallel — with the same speed and convenience. Joby estimates it can operate at about $3 per seat mile, which would be an order of magnitude less expensive than a helicopter or private jet and only about an order of magnitude more expensive than commercial airlines.

But Joby could also have the range of a private jet, flying over 500 miles.

If Joby can get to significantly lower operating costs than helicopters with the range of a private jet, it could expand the market more than 10x in 5-500 mile range flights. To put the market size into perspective, there are over 12,000 helicopters in operation in the U.S. alone and 15,000 private jets. Eventually, could 100,000 eVTOLs be flying around on-demand? That may be a 100x opportunity…

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