Joby Aviation is paying about $500 million for a 250-person company in Dayton, Ohio. Then it is moving its own defense programs into the thing it just bought. Joby's announcement says why: housing that work inside Resonant Sciences lets the commercial aviation organization keep its primary focus on certifying, manufacturing, and commercializing the electric air taxi. That is a company spending $450 million in cash to stop two of its engineering programs from fighting over the same calendar.
What Joby actually bought
Resonant Sciences designs, manufactures and delivers RF and mission systems for U.S. national security customers. It runs out of Dayton with facilities in Virginia, West Virginia, Michigan, Colorado and North Carolina. Joby's release puts it at roughly 250 employees, more than $100 million in trailing revenue growing 40 percent year over year, and EBITDA margins in the high teens. The price is $450 million cash and $50 million in Joby stock, with certain Resonant employees keeping an equity stake. Co-founder and CEO J. Micah North stays in the chair. Close is expected in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval.
In a normal tuck-in the acquired team gets absorbed into the buyer's org chart. Here it runs the other way. Joby's dual-use turbine-electric and hydrogen-electric aircraft programs move into Resonant, along with its dual-use autonomy stack and, per TechCrunch, the L3Harris collaboration on a gas-turbine hybrid VTOL. The hydrogen-electric work flew 521 miles in 2024. That is not a program you shut down. It is a program you cannot run next to a type certification.
A certification program takes the whole company, on no notice
I ran into the sharp end of this at Galen. We did our Q-sub and told the FDA we planned a 16-subject cadaver study using residents. It was in the letter. The FDA wrote back that it sounded great and to go for it. Then we got into substantive review, and the first question out of their mouth was whether we intended to market to residents. The study design they had approved in writing two months earlier was now the thing they were questioning.
So I went to Johns Hopkins with my hat in my hand. Neurosurgery gave me a free OR and cadaver heads, on the condition that I not disturb the brain. In two weeks I recruited 16 attending surgeons and re-ran the entire study. That is the notice a regulator gives you when it decides your file needs something it did not ask for before, and there is no version of that scramble where your best engineers and your quality lead are half-committed to a customer program with its own delivery date. FAA type certification runs on the same physics. So does a DoD qualification.
Underneath the calendar fight is a configuration fight
A certification program wants a frozen design baseline and a traceable record of every change made against it. Contract R&D wants a fresh configuration per program and per customer. Both are legitimate ways to run engineering. Put them in one building and the freeze leaks, because the people holding the baseline are the same people being asked to modify it for the customer who is paying this quarter.
I have watched medical device teams grow a smaller version of the same fork. A surgeon champion asks for a variant, the team builds it because the relationship is worth more than the hours, and the design history file quietly picks up a branch nobody documented. The same thing happens in climate hardware when a utility pilot wants a one-off configuration. The defense version is the same fork with a classification on it, which makes it harder to see and much harder to unwind.
None of that makes Joby's defense revenue a mistake. A business doing north of $100 million, growing 40 percent, at high-teens margins is a better business than most of what the eVTOL sector has produced in fifteen years, and Joby is keeping it. What Joby is buying is somewhere else to put it: its own CEO, its own P&L, its own address.
I have watched founders treat contract revenue as a hedge against a long certification path, and it works right up until the regulator moves. Then you find out you have two products and one team, and the program with a customer paying this quarter wins the argument every time. Joby's fix costs $450 million in cash; the cheap version is a separate team, a separate design baseline, and the willingness to tell a paying customer no.
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Dave Saunders is the founder of Base Reality Group and a Fractional CPO for product companies. He was a founder and operator at Galen Robotics, where the surgical-robotics platform earned FDA De Novo authorization in 2023, and he managed a 35-patent portfolio licensed from Johns Hopkins. He wrote Founders Who Finish and publishes The Build. More about Dave →