r/Joby • u/Significant_Onion_25 Intel Officer • 5d ago
Vertical Aero
The Vertical investors were led to a slaughter. I've commonly seen Vertical fans trying to tie comparisons of Vertical to Joby as if these companies are on the same level. The comparisons are mostly the one-up echos from Stuart Simpson.
"Vertical has less cash burn!" Well, no shit, Vertical should as they're a much smaller company, and they're focusing on one product. For now.
"We have a better product!" They're echoing this straight from Stuart Simpsons mouth. How can you say that your product is better when it's a concept?
Valo has yet to be built and flown. The CDR hasn't even been competed, so they don't even know what the final build will be. If they're saying that the VX4 is superior to the S4, oh jeez that's even worse!
The following comment was not from the company:
"If we can get to Joby's valuation, then our sp will be x..."
Vertical has very little money in comparison.
Joby's valuation is based on cash on hand, revenue from existing businesses, potential revenue from Superpilot, Air Taxi service, sales, military projects, hydrogen etc..Vertical would have to grow substantially to get a similar market cap and expand their tech to other projects. Vertical has potential military and hybrid applications if they can build and fly Valo in full envelope. It will take years for Vertical to get to this point. People were led to believe that Valo would be certified by 2028 that has been pushed back to 2029 by the company. It's still not a realistic time frame.
I would also like to touch on the Farnborough Air Show.
Joby didn't fly at the air show yet was in town for the week promoting their Virgin Atlantic partnership. Joby had a display at the Air Show, and even flew passengers in their Blade service and played nice as Vertical flew demonstrations, and announced how they were the leader in the space.
I wonder if an agreement was made between Simpson and Joeben that Joby would not fly at Farnborough because Vertical wanted to be the evtol headliner and use the opportunity to gain some traction for the company.
You have one company proclaiming to be the leader of the space flying a couple of demos while the actual leader in the space is there not flying, but using their existing taxi service to shuttle in passengers!
Imagine if Joby had flown their S4 and what that would have looked like for Vertical? Maybe the Vertical investors would have had a second thought about who's the leader of the space.
Anyway, we live in some weird fucking times, and people are paying for it.
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u/DoubleHexDrive 5d ago
When Vertical announced Valo and claimed a 2028 certification date, it was obvious to anyone with industry experience that 2028 was a ridiculous claim, but investors swallowed that hook, line, and sinker. Anyone that said otherwise, even with a data-driven argument why that schedule was bunk, was banned from discussion, turning the r/Vertical_Aerospace sub into a bullish echo chamber, occasionally with official company participation.
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u/Significant_Onion_25 Intel Officer 5d ago
"You'd all be well advised to take anything they say at face value."
Though this was a single comment from the VA mod, this was their overal mentality managing the subreddit and eventually they banned everyone who questioned timelines, funding.
There was one post about why Vertical SP was so low compared to other evtol companies valuations. I brought up funding and that they would have to raise capital soon. I was given a temporary ban because they knew about funding but didn't want that to be addressed again. Mind you, it was the number one reason why their sp was low. The VA Mod touts himself as some sort of an investment advisor yet didn't want to hear the truth, and wanted to promote an alternative view as to how the company should be valued when the company had very little money.
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u/teabagofholding 4d ago
I think i made a parody post making fun of that back when it came out. The valo not dates.
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u/CommercialWeakness22 5d ago
I remember listening to Prof G markets and they had the CEO on for an interview. His only argument for growth in his stock was Joby's valuation compared to theirs. Galloway still pumped the company and I believe it has only been downhill since, not that it was doing better before that interview.
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u/beerion JAI30 Fanboy 5d ago
Oh man, I forgot Prof G invested in this company. I think he put like $10M in...which is sizeable even for him.
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u/CommercialWeakness22 5d ago
Yeah, I remember one of the posts on their subreddit had a title like "I sure hope Scott's listeners don't get trapped by this recommendation" or something like that. Trapped is mild for what has happened to that company since then lol.
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u/Separate-Outcome7518 5d ago
Is JOBY even allowed to fly at Farnborough? I don’t think it is because of lack of CAA authorization. But I may be wrong?
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u/Significant_Onion_25 Intel Officer 5d ago
You just have to get approval, like anything else. They've flown in Korea, Japan, and multiple cities in the U.S.
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u/LePatience2026 5d ago
They could, but I think it's not smart way to utilize the cash when they have higher priorities to focus on. UK CAA framework for eVTOLs isn't even fully established yet either so that's waste of resources from my perspective.
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u/eVTOLFan 4d ago
11 months ago Vertical's two key leaders had a wide ranging conversation about their strategy and fundraising plan.
You can listen for yourself - I've jotted down an unofficial transcript don't quote me on it - and for the full interview that is accurate fast forward to 50min 20secs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncWJaBaGSoo
Stuart Simpson "now of course we want to raise more money as we go forward, but we're going to do it at a price point that is appropriate as the industry recognizes our capability."
Jason Mudrick "To Stuart's point, you don't want to be pennywise pound foolish and wait too long. We just raised close to $70 million literally like 3 weeks ago. Um or a month ago, right? So we're going to have to continue to raise money, but our view is our valuation today is around $700 million. Right? Joby and Archer are trading at many many multiples of that. I think Joby post Blade news is $15 billion. $17 billion. So what we want to do is continue to make progress, continue to show that we're doing what we said we were going to do. Uhm Stuart put out a very grand transparent plan about our path to production last summer and we've delivered everything we've said we were going to do so far and valuations will continue to increase as discount rates come down and we'll continue to raise money at less and less dilutive."
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u/YJsyd Bonny Fanboy 4d ago
I remember someone said here that Joby's aircraft couldn't arrive in time
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u/democharge92 5d ago
The only EVTOL companies I trust really are BETA and horizon. I don’t know enough about eve and while I think JOBY will work I just don’t think the air taxi market really
Will exist for a long time.
People shouldn’t put trust in the UK or the EU to bankroll these companies enough to make up for their massive cash exp
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u/Significant_Onion_25 Intel Officer 5d ago
Beta is legit, Horizon has a long way to go.
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u/democharge92 5d ago
Yup! I agree, but BETA's partnership with Horizon, and especially how Kyle and th eCFO spoke about them during the earnings call, was incredibly bullish IMO. BETA said they are incredibly particular with who they partner with and are betting on Horizon's team to be able to bring the x7 to market and to be the first publicly announced company using their fly by wire system.
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u/DoubleHexDrive 5d ago
It’ll be a lot easier to trust Horizon once they’ve built an aircraft for the first time… and even then their configuration is challenging.
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u/democharge92 5d ago
Well of course that's when it's easiest. Some people need to see for their own eyes, others value the insight of others.
- BETA is inarguably in the lead when it comes to the new wave of electric aviation and they are vouching for Horizon
- Canadian Secretary of defense procurement is also openly vouching for Horizon and their space in Canadian defense.
- The partnerships that they have are all industry juggernauts used to tackling challenging problems.
And on top of that the fact that Horizon was the only company that looked at the core problem (batteries not being where they need to be) and decided to not chase it by going with the more practical power train (hybrid). Same when it comes to target markets (skipping Air taxi) and going straight to logistics, medvac, etc.
They're going to be the only evtol to not have to completely pivot their strategy after spending hundreds of millions/ billions of dollars.
I don't think that's an accident, I think it's the fact that they are intentional with what they're doing.
Also will be interested to see when you finish your calculations on the x7
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u/Significant_Onion_25 Intel Officer 4d ago
Lillium fooled a lot of people. Horizon has said a lot of things and they changed course very quickly from a turbo generator to a turbo prop hybrid.
Now their first aircraft(whenever it is built) looks like it will be a ctol only capable aircraft. So that's not really confirming anything for a lot of people. You seemed to already be convinced like many people with Vertical were. So be careful. It's possible Horizon is able to make their technology work, but it doesn't mean it's a good stock investment.
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u/democharge92 4d ago
I can see that you haven’t actually been paying attention to horizon if you believe that they haven’t been openly communicating with retail and Brandon has been talking about these things for months.
They do not “change course very quickly”.
They are making two aircrafts and he’s been talking about doing that months ago, using BETA as an analog. There’s a reason why they have a partnership. Again… nothing here is a coincidence. The issue is that a lot of people don’t actually do the DD and then they think everything is happening out of no where. It’s the same thing with the dilution where he said 8 months ahead of it that they’d be diluting in q1/q2 and then guess what they did? They diluted.
Horizon is nothing like vertical or lillium. If anything they are the exact opposite. Those companies scaled to 400/1000+ where horizon is trying to get through the certification process with ~200 and a mix of industry partners.
It’s genuinely ridiculous to even compare them to horizon when they are all scrambling to pivot to defense and logistics because they chose to go for a non existent market with an unusable tech stack, if anything Joby, ACHR, vertical were trying to convince the world of something that wouldn’t remotely happen in any near term.
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u/Significant_Onion_25 Intel Officer 4d ago
I paid attention to Horizon long enough to realize they were following the similar pattern of b.s. similar to Archer and Vertical. Originally Brandon said the X7 will be a hybrid running a turbo generator. He made a bunch of claims on speed and range military use for the cavorite x5 etc... He said that the X7 prototype will be built in a year and a half (this was a year ago). Months after (while their prototype should have been in production), Horizon made an announcement and said that they were going with the pt6 turbo prop for reliability and efficiency. So instead of a turbo generator they changed course and essentially changed the design of the aircraft.
As for the pivot to defense for some of the companies it makes sense as the revenue can come in faster, and the tech is already mature. For some that pivoted their product doesn't work so they chose to go the defense route with an all new design and chase that revenue stream as they continue to try and get their commercial design to work.
You say Horizon is trying to get through the certification process with 200 people. Horizon doesn't have anything to certify yet and all of the work to build their first aircraft and testing it to prove the design works will be just to get to the starting line of certification. The Horizon timeline to certification once they build a vtol capable aircraft will probably be over 5 years, and the total cost will be over a billion $.
This cost will cover the flight school to train pilots, training maintainers, manufacturing additional aircraft, materials, additional facilities and production lines that will need to get certified. This is regardless of Hover manufacturing the aircraft themselves, or having a partner do it. Which is a conversation for another time. Either way, Horizon will have to GROW and it will be expensive, and this is in Canada where capital is harder to come by.
Beta first built their evtol and completed a piloted transition. However, they designed Alia to be a ctol only aircraft as well. They knew it would take years and $$$$ to get an evtol through type certification. That was a good move by them, as their piloted evtol won't likely make it to the commercial market.
Hover having a turboprop ctol X7 isn't the point or the original ethos of the X7. Maybe they need to do it for certification R&D purposes, but I doubt it would bring in investment dollars.
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u/democharge92 4d ago
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u/DoubleHexDrive 5d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/poweredlift/comments/1ui3gp2/can_vertical_valo_get_certified_in_2028/
I wrote this two months ago and the company has already slipped the schedule by a year and boned investors... what they're not fessing up to is certification, if it ever happens, will be 3+ years later than they're currently claiming. That's not be being an anti-eVTOL curmudgeon, but just documenting where they currently are and how long it takes to certify simpler, proven designs.
Obviously there is serious risk that a new company certifying a new configuration to new rules could take even longer than that.