Everyone, moving along here. Our next presenters are the folks with Blade Urban Air Mobility and their CEO, Rob Wiesenthal. I know Rob has a quick video that he wants to show before we get into Q&A. Roll it. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. For those of you who dreamed of a future full of flight and limitless possibility, your time has come. Flight time to Vegas, five minutes. BLADE. Fly the Future Today. Very nice. Pretty cool, right? Very cool. Are you gearing up for a busy summer or? Yeah. It's looking forward to a great Memorial Day weekend, both in our leisure routes in New York Airport. South of France, we have the Cannes Film Festival this week. Memorial Day weekend, we have the Monaco Grand Prix, which is probably the biggest day for helicopter flight in Southern Europe. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot going on over the next week for sure. Yeah. Busy start to the spring, summer period, I guess, right? Hoping for good weather. Exactly. Look, what I think is always good when I have folks from BLADE up here is just maybe just to start it off, like very quick overview of the business, 'cause I think a lot of people out there just view BLADE as kind of a personal chopper service to, you know, wherever they wanna go, it's, but it's more than that. Maybe just take a couple minutes. Sure, sure. Kind of go through some of the different business lines that you have. Yeah. When we started the company in 2014, the idea actually was to build the entire ecosystem that was gonna be required for electric vertical aircraft, where you may call eVTOL in the future. Yeah. We knew that at that point it was a long way off. It's obviously much closer now. That really required, three pillars, you know, infrastructure, within big cities. So these are like proprietary terminals, almost like FBOs that don't sell fuel, where you can aggregate passengers, you can do luggage checks, and you can kind of turn helicopters, you know, which means loading and head setting people and, like, getting the helicopters on and off so you can get some real volume. A technology stack that goes from cockpit to the customer. So it's everything from the pilot computing, weight and balance, so they can get a new mission in 15 minutes, and working with our logistics people on an operator dashboard, so we use the right tail numbers to maximize profits and minimize dead legs. A consumer-facing app, right? Yeah. You couple that with our, you know, about 350,000 users. We've probably flew up close to 400,000 people pre-COVID across all these, you know, Canada, U.S., Europe and India, and these routes. That is that ecosystem. The objective is to do this on an asset-light basis, so we could have an asset swap to EVA when it's ready. Along the way, we had so much expertise in logistics that we found huge opportunities in the medical business, and we quickly became the largest air transporter of human organs in the United States. Mm-hmm. Under BLADE MediMobility division. That same helicopter that people are flying under in the day is the helicopter used at night. Got it. The operators enjoy a lot more amortization of their fixed costs in terms of the cost of the helicopter, the hangars, insurance, maintenance people. They're making more money. We can get better deals, a lot more access, and then we've lowered the cost for customers. We're you know, Yeah ... Saving lives every day with a hospital. Instead of what, say, NYU Langone Health would do, in New York, where they used to take a ambulance across Manhattan for an hour and then go to Teterboro, get on a G4 to go to Philly, we can actually fly from Langone and land on a Philadelphia Philly ... Yeah, hospital, skipping a bunch of ambulances, skipping a jet, and that really that's reduced the price from, say, $50,000, $60,000 to about $4,000. Wow. When you have a trip like that. Now we're doing much longer haul trips because of profusion technology, where organs live out-live outside the body much longer. We even done trips in jets to Alaska now. The business growth has been exponential. Think last quarter, about 111% year-over-year quarter growth for the medical business. We're now 50/50 roughly in the revenue side, medical versus passenger. It's a nice fit. Yeah. It's all capital light, right? All capital light, yeah. You don't own the assets. We do not own any aircraft or maintain them or fly them. There's enough work with getting that ecosystem right, taking care of the passengers, taking care of the hospitals. Yep. ... Getting the customer experience right, the digital side, the marketing. That's what we're good at. You basically run your lounges, right? Well, it's a little more than yeah. We do run our lounges, but it's definitely a lot more than that. Like, no. Yeah. The true, like, owner/operator model would be the lounges, right? Oh, well, no, we don't even own those. Those are leased. Oh, oh, okay. Got it. Yeah, we build them out. We don't own... Oh, I thought you were saying own. Yes. Yeah, those are all... Sometimes they're free because we have a lot of landings, and people want us at their heliport or airport. Yeah. Sometimes there's a minimal cost. Okay. ... For a lease. It's helpful to the heliports and the airports because we're taking care of our own passengers. A lot of the services that they would normally do, we do. You have to understand that when it comes to non-commercial aviation, what they call GA, general aviation, where we kind of fit in- Okay. ... this kind of in between Part 135 category where we're aggregating people, but we're not going through airport terminals, so we have to do a lot of this stuff ourselves in terms of- Yep. ... assembling passengers and security and baggage assessment. They're used to like, you know, corporate executives who just show up and get on a private jet or their own- Mm-hmm ... helicopter. It's very different when you have people flying on a by-the-seat basis, multiple flights. We're flying, you know, every, you know, 20 minutes, 15 minutes from New York to the airport, 12 hours a day, six days a week. Yeah. The volume is really big. Okay, got it. On the earnings call, I think, you know, one number really stood out to me, and that was, I think it was a 46% increase in first time BLADE Airport customers. Did you market a lot to get them? It was definitely-. ... kind of a return to travel? A lot of return to travel, a lot of marketing, we're up nearly 100% in the first quarter. It's really been driven by passenger seats, you know, both new and repeat flyers and pricing. It's $195 or $95 as much as you want with an airport pass for $795. We literally beat Uber Black without an airport pass. Yeah. ... and UberX with an airport pass. since we introduced fare classes and add-ons like cars on the other end to give that multimodality and that seamlessness, our average price is about $245. Last week, I think we were at $281. There's definitely a lot of range of the kind of people who are flying us. In terms of the new passenger count, it's definitely not a lack of returning passengers, it's growth. That's where. Just the new passengers and the growth is overshadowing the return passengers. Interesting. For BLADE Airport flyers, what are the demographics there? Age, income, you know. Well, I can tell you- That if. Yeah. I'll tell you, it's we're 60% business. 60, okay. ... and kind of, and 40% leisure. We're about 30% international right now. International has really grown fast. In terms of people going to international flights. Yeah. It's really growing fast. We have a terrific partnership with JetBlue, where if you fly Mint coast to coast, you can fly BLADE for free. Oh, really? That started a couple weeks ago. Yeah. We also, if you're Mosaic +, you have free four flights. If you're Mosaic, you get two free flights. If you're TrueBlue, you get discounts. This is actually the first time I see people writing things down. A lot of TrueBlue- I did not. Make sure you get your free flights and your discounts. I did not know that. Yeah. Well, they actually bought a flight bank, so this is not a promotion- Yeah Where You're not giving it away. No, no. They really love the product and the seamlessness. It's a great way to differentiate themselves versus other airlines. I think you're gonna see more of that. Yeah, I was gonna say- In the future. There have to be a lot of other opportunities like that. Yeah. I think you'll see a lot of that in Europe probably to start, where the code sharing has been done historically, where you're bundling airline seats with the helicopter transfers. Then I think you'll hopefully see that more in the, in international to New York, and then hopefully other domestic carriers. Yeah ... as we continue to move forward. Got it. Do you have a general sense of what your typical income cohort is? It really- So- Look, it really ranges because you have the one and dones who, they realize it's kind of like a great experience because I'm going to the airport. I'm not only getting there quickly, but in New York, I'm seeing the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Brooklyn Bridge. Yep. You know, going to Kennedy, I'm seeing the Barclays Center, too. You have those kind of one and dones because frankly, at the price of an Uber Black, it's not that expensive. Yeah ... pretty low down the spectrum, you know? I was $75,000-$85,000 a year, and then we go all the way up because we also, you know, we'll do charters and things like that. Also on the business side, I think we're starting to crack big corporate. Generally right now it's smaller companies, more individual businessman. Okay. you know That was gonna be my question 'cause I'm, I don't think Bank of America has a BLADE corporate account. Yeah. They do. The funny thing is the best way to do it, I've found, and when I was CFO of Sony, my big analogy, and I'll make it quick, was, we had to use BlackBerrys with security. I remember telling, you know, people kept saying, "I gotta use an iPhone. I want an iPhone. Yeah. People started buying their own iPhones, and eventually I had to tell the head of IT, "You know what? I can't deal with this anymore. Yeah. Let them use iPhones." We're seeing the same thing, you know, especially around Hudson Yards, where 50,000 people live, work, and recreate in Manhattan. It's across the street from BLADE Lounge West, where you have people basically saying, "Look, I bought my own Airport Pass. It's $95. You're spending $220 on a car service. This is the way I'm doing it." They're like, "Okay, fine. Yeah. You definitely, I think, ground up from the people as opposed to mandating it at the top is definitely, it's worked much better for us. That'll just take time. Yeah. I have a few cards I can give you then. Yeah. Exactly. I guess, you know, I would assume outside of, in your kind of pure leisure business, the income demographic is pretty high. Yeah. You know, I've been, you know, I live on Long Island. Like, I hear about, you know, deals you can get on Hamptons rentals these days, you know, heading into summer. Mm-hmm. I know your booking curve is probably super short. Yeah. Have you given any thought to what, like, what the potential implications are on your business based on just what we hear from the real estate market? Yeah. Well, I think that, there's definitely a secular change in the way people go to leisure markets. In other words, you know, my generation, say, whether it be in the Nantucket or the Hamptons, they'd rent a house from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Then, you know, decade later, it became, "Let's just take June, July or August." Now it's been chopped up because of Airbnb. Yeah. I think these houses are just being rented differently, and I think the landlords haven't yet gotten a memo, so to speak, that this is probably the way it's going. Frankly, that's good for us because as opposed to owners, you know, the renters may have less income to fly back and forth every weekend, and they wanna make it special, so they go out and they fly BLADE, whether a seaplane or a helicopter. Also when they're going to Europe or anywhere else, they use our airport product. That's good as well. I don't really see any issue, this kind of change in the rental market, because it's not people not going or renting their houses, they're just renting those houses differently. I can't imagine traffic is gonna be any better this summer than it was last summer. No. Yeah. It's, you know, even in the city, I mean, post-pandemic, the traffic between everything 'cause of all these restaurant sheds and construction that got restarted after COVID. Yep. You know, for Airport, we're turning two-hour drives into five-minute flights. you know, the value prop is really there for the flyer. What is it from the West Side helipad to East Hampton? Oh, to East Hampton in time? Yeah. Depending on the type of helicopter or seaplane, it can be as little as 30 minutes. Yeah. Okay. You know, we fly to Montauk as well. We know a lot of times, and we track traffic very carefully, where, you know, number of weekends where they had five, six-hour drives. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It definitely, when you add that up and you think about how much people are spending for their weekend or they spend for their house, you know. Yeah You, over the course of the summer, you literally create an entire other weekend of waking hours. Yeah. By flying. Yeah. That's obviously one of the only things you can't buy is time. Exactly. It's been a very profitable product for a very long time. You know, it's close to 100% market share as. Yeah ...You can't think we actually probably are now this summer on a by-the-sea basis. We'll be at 100% market share for that region. You know, the real growth we see is on the medical side, and on Europe, which is really, it's a... We took three companies, we put them under a common brand. They didn't have any marketing. They had no technology. Mm-hmm. There was no consistent customer experience. We built the lounge in Cannes, Nice, Monaco. Really feel good about that. We'll be RedBird Capital took a 5% stake in us. They own AC Milan. We'll be doing Monaco to Milan, a lot more events, you know, because our Monaco heliport is literally inside the streets of the track of the Monaco Grand Prix. Oh, really? We have that. Yeah. We do a lot with Formula 1. Yeah ...of Tripadvisor, which is a Liberty-owned company. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more events. We did Coachella this year. Any place where there's a use case, where a lot of people are going to the same place at the same time, and the infrastructure wasn't built to surge capacity, is a great way to showcase our product, and we do it with sponsorship. We have a lot of brands, you know, different verticals for everything from spirits. Yep ...clothes, technology, and people who participate in events. Mm-hmm ...you know, for us. I think, you know, overall, like, the, you know, the growth is strong, medical is very strong, and there’s a great symbiosis, as I mentioned, between both those in terms of the logistics team, but also the aircraft, getting more hours on the aircraft. Last question on the airport side. With 30% of your airport customers going on to international flights, I would, I assume, I think that's probably at JFK number. Newark too. Yeah. Right, and Newark. Do you think there's more brand awareness for the BLADE product in the U.S. or in Europe? Well, I think, Well, there's definitely more in the U.S., but we were shocked that when we went to Europe, that people immediately knew about BLADE. I think that's been the power of the airport product, because if you think of New York as a capital of the United States... Yeah. An epicenter of the United States, people were coming from all over the world into New York, and they were using the Airport product to get back and forth from the airports. They were aware of BLADE for that. Yep. Now they're seeing BLADE in Europe, and now we're moving people who are comfortable in the U.S. with BLADE as opposed to, you know, six on the, you know, helicopter companies that they don't know the name of or airline companies. We've definitely built that business. We're moving a lot more people, I'm expecting this summer from the U.S., but also I think the brand has resonated very well in Europe because of, you know, being in the airport business for so long. Maybe changing gears a little bit, to kind of the EVA opportunity. You clearly have the real estate with your, with your helipads. How far away is this technology from reality? Well, the thesis always was, for us, we're going to build a great and profitable business with conventional aircraft today, both in the medical side and on the passenger side. If EVA arrives early, your NPV is higher, EVA arrives later, we're gonna be that much bigger, right? Mm-hmm. The big reason why this is important to us is that the great unlock for exponential growth on the passenger side is more landing zones. The only way we get more landing zones is with quiet aircraft. Yeah. That's why you'll see, you know, in New York City, all the BLADE terminals are on the water, on the Hudson River, on the East River, on Wall Street, on the southern tip of Manhattan. It's always on the water, even, you know, in Europe, because of noise- Yeah. generally. If we had one landing zone south of Central Park, and north of 43rd Street, that could be bigger than the entire New York business itself, because you're not only going to the airport from Midtown, but you have interconnectivity between Wall Street, Midtown East Side, at West Side, East Side. I'm not getting that helipad at Bryant Park anytime soon. Yeah. Listen, back to your question. Yeah. We've always been very conservative. You know, we were, I think, when we went public, saying kinda 2025. I think we're about 2026 right now, 2026, when you're first gonna start seeing them. Also understand that, you know, in the beginning there's, you're not gonna have maybe the number of seats that you want, the, you know, the amount of weight that I would want. We need a portfolio of different types of aircraft. You're gonna see that kind of cohabitation phase of helicopters and EVA kinda living together. Mm-hmm. I think what's really interesting to us, and we're grateful for it to a certain extent, is that the EVA manufacturers who used to wanna build the entire stack, you know, be a service like BLADE, have a brand, have the technology, I think they basically said, "You know what? Let's just build these aircraft right now. We can worry about that later." I think that our operators will be the biggest customers by far in the industry. That's why we have such a great relationship with all of them. You know, while we're not waiting around for them, obviously with this growing medical business and our passenger business. Yeah. There's a lot of money behind it. The issue is really a certification issue. It's not a technology issue. These things are flying every day. Okay. Yeah. I've seen a lot of the videos from- Yeah. from the OEMs. What's your anticipated timeline in terms of certification? When do you think that? Is that the 2026 opportunity? That's the 2026. Okay. I think, You know. When does it become a... If 2026 is certification, how long until commercial reality? You know, I think you'll start seeing them in fleet potentially 2026, I mean, 2027 would be probably an outside time. When I mean in fleet is, you know, which is great for us because if you think about it's a brand new type of propulsion, a brand new type of aerodynamics. There are gonna be some people saying, "You know what? I'm not gonna get on this thing," right? I'll take the helicopter a few times. Yeah. Let someone else try it. If there's anybody who's gonna get on one, right, it's gonna be someone who's been in a helicopter first. Yeah. We got hundreds of thousands of those people. As opposed to an OEM which doesn't have a brand and has never flown people before, we're probably in a better. Mm-hmm. -situation. it's gonna be an introduction, you know. In the beginning, there'll be kind of early adopters who are thrilled to fly it. Yeah. Will pay any price, and then you'll see it become more mainstream over time. Yeah. Look, it's huge upside option value in the company, but it's nothing that we rely on to, you know, make our numbers work right now. Of course, yeah. When I think about the, just the future of EVA, right? Like figure 2026 certification, 2027 commercially viable. Probably prove it out at your helipads first, is that when we start to see, okay, maybe we can move into more dense markets with this quieter aircraft? Exactly. It's, it's When people can see it, see that it's safe, see that it's quiet, that it's zero emissions, that's when the local legislators and the public, you know, get behind it. In order to be city 2.0, you have to have an urban air mobility strategy. If you talk to people at the Eno Center for Transportation, if you talk to any kind of city planner, they'll just tell you, like, "Look, you look even..." Use Manhattan as an example. It's my hometown. Fine. You know, a couple hundred years ago, we had just houses there, then we had to build vertically, right? To put people in offices and, in homes and apartments. The same thing's gonna happen in transportation. We're starting on the ground- Yeah. where the infrastructure's been there for, ages and really hasn't been updated. We have some subways underneath. You know, it took the Second Avenue Subway years to. Yep. get done. Still not done yet. We are that middle layer between the jets and- Yeah. in the sky and the cars on the ground. That middle layer will be a transportation corridor. Yeah. with electric vertical aircraft. I don't think, and especially in the early years, this is not gonna eliminate congestion. It's gonna put companies on the map, make it easier to do business. You know, clearly like in India with BLADE now, you know, you can visit four companies in a day or two. You know, Mumbai, Shirdi, Pune. We used to, before BLADE, in India, like, you could be in India for five days- Right. to visit all these companies because of the traffic and how difficult to get by air. Yeah. I think cities realize that if they wanna improve productivity and make it an easy place to do business, you need that. This is not like a. We never envisioned the Jetsons future. This is not like going or hitting a button and for $40 you get your own aircraft. Yep. This is gonna be a shared aircraft, just like we do right now to the airport, on a consistent basis, various routes, affordable pricing, relatively competitive with ground. It's gonna be more additive and accretive as opposed to, you know, everyone. It's not a flying car. Right. Do you envision sourcing your operators and pilots in EVA the same way you source helicopters? Yeah. If you take a look, the certification path is really Most of these aircraft are part fixed wing, part rotorcraft in terms of technology, right? They can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but they go forward like a plane. A lot of them do have wings. Yep. Yep. Yep. you know, I think, you know, what we can do is offer our operators, you know, hours in terms of how many hours that we can fly... Mm-hmm. They can finance against, basically what we can do for them. Which happens right now with Textron from Bell and Airbus. You know, we'll get calls, you know, from Airbus saying, "Okay, so and so wants to buy this helicopter. How many hours do you think you could do it on the BLADE program?" Because, like, they. Okay. figure out how much they can loan them and such. We're gonna become part of the financing solution, not as owners or debt holders, but as people who they can show a history of being on our platform and how many hours that they've done. Mm-hmm. Most, we have about 29 key operators now. There are a lot of operators who solely work with BLADE at this point, nobody else, because they get to reduce their costs. They have lower marketing costs. They don't have to worry about customer service. You know, if it's a credit card dispute, we deal with it. If it's weather recovery, we deal with it. Got it. They get to focus on what they're do best, which is, you know, flying and maintaining aircraft. Mm-hmm. Got it. Interesting. Okay, last topic with, eight or so minutes, eight or 10 minutes, left here. The MediMobility. Obviously, this has been a great, you know, great story for you. Just terrific. Why do you think you know, why do you think you've been so successful in gaining share? You know, this really, it's been a mom-and-pop business. When we go into hospitals, you know, through the early days, you know, people would have a Post-it note with the name of an ambulance company and a jet company. We really came in and in certain areas, not all areas, but professionalized it. You know, when I say all areas, not all hospitals. Some have really good programs. We provided this, you know, end-to-end solution. We have, you know, lights and sirens SUVs that can move organs like you saw in that video, run by third parties also. We have our, you know, helicopters and now jets also that are doing longer distance because of perfusion. We manage chain of custody. We have the technology platform for them, and we are there, and we're reliable. I think when you deal with hospital contracts, you know, can imagine there's that kind of that never underestimate the power of incumbency. It's kinda like, you know, the, you know, there's some contracts, like at schools or hospitals or things that have been on for a long time for everything. Yep. for, I don't know, from, like, food to cleaning and, you know. Eventually, you know, I don't wanna say people get lazy, but they take it for granted. Yeah. We go to the procurement parts of these companies, talk about how much money we can save them and how we can talk to transplant surgeons and heads of transplant centers, like, how we can really improve outcomes. When we started, we became number one in New York, and we saw the guys at Trinity, and we saw what we could build together, and our ability to source the aircraft and leverage our helicopters, you know. This business has grown five times from when we bought it with $20 million in revenues to over a $100 million run rate based on the Q1. You're talking about, you know, 15 points or more of margin, you know, high teens margin. A better margin than the-. Great business. airport business, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. BLADE. Yeah, better than the airport business. Not as good as leisure. Okay. It's you know, it definitely, this is, it's only getting bigger. The definition of an organ that is suitable for transplant and a patient who is suitable for being a recipient, that aperture has improved, in addition to organs living longer out of the body because of perfusion devices that we actually put on the planes. Right. We can fly, you know, an organ literally like we've done it to Alaska in the past couple months. It's great. What kind of range do you have for that type of- You know, generally, they're shorter distances. There'll be, you know, kind of like Hawker 800s, things like that. If we have to go out of our core network for something longer, we obviously can do that. This is also where, like, our people on the ground, you know, we're so used to handling people on the ground, getting them into helicopters, getting them out of helicopters, make sure they're safe on a tarmac. Like, we need people to actually put these perfusion devices on board these aircraft. Right. They know what type of device, how to load an aircraft safely and things like that. It really fits in well, and, you know, I think investors are finally seeing it, like, there is no other way to play this part of medical. We don't, we don't get paid by the insurance companies. It's not like EMS at all. The hospitals pay us net 30, you know, or 60. The terms depend. We're not like we're collecting from. All the kind of real shrapnel that you've seen in this industry, really difficult for them, we don't have in the already built business. It is just, it's blue skies for us, I have to admit. We take the job really seriously, and we kind of earn our stripes every day. Right now we're about mid-20s market share. I can absolutely see that double in short order. Oh, wow. Yeah, I was gonna ask, do you see With your success, have there been any sort of new entrants of late or? No. Just staying. No, I think we do a good job getting contracts from hospitals. You know, we've seen some acquisitions. There could be some on the horizon. You know, you have to really balance your ability to get contracts on your own versus buying a company that has existing contracts. Most of them are long-term. But, you know, it's also interesting that, you know, we've now, you know, have a lot of analysts and funds and investors who are really focusing on this part of the business. Exciting for us. Right. lastly on this, are there any regulatory issues in the medical side of things that investors should be aware of? No. I mean, it's really I mean, I would say that all the wins are for being realized like that anything that can be done to improve outcomes and lower the cost to hospitals and patients, the support is really there. It's just been great. When you think about the first use cases for EVA, you know, now once we get out of line of sight regulations for drones, we're doing a lot more movements of organs without doctors. You normally fly a doctor with an organ, it's a great use case for drones, it'll be a great use case for EVA as well. That is definitely part of our EVA roadmap. Okay. Great. With a minute or two left, any questions from the audience? Rob, any kind of last thoughts you would like to leave in investors' minds? Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think we're coming off a heavy investment period. Yeah. We've made a lot of acquisitions. I think that, you know, if you take a look at, you know, our path to profitability, you know, our LTM EBITDA was about, you know, negative $20 million. If you take the acquisition we just did in Europe, we're just kind of single-digit millions. You know, you can get to $20 million. If you even take, you know, medical just growing 100%, you know, organically and we're doing 15%-20% margins. You slow that down, you'll get another $10 million of EBITDA. Now we're in single-digit EBITDA. Yeah. levels now on the negative side. That's before any increase in airport profitability, which I'm really counting on as we reduce marketing costs and enjoy the kind of growth we're having and showing the pricing power. I feel, I think investors really need to focus on that. See that profitability with an eyesight for sure. It is clearly that, you know, people, I meet them every day, had no idea we had a medical business. Yeah. It's literally half our revenues. That's why I started this off. Yeah. Tell us a little about that. No, it really, it is terrific. We appreciate, you know, your support and then also letting us, you know, explain, you know, the two big pillars of the company. Great. Perfect. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it.