Joby Aviation has agreed to buy Resonant Sciences for $500 million in a mix of cash and stock, according to a regulatory filing that went up on Tuesday. Resonant, based in Ohio, builds radio frequency and sensing hardware. Under the deal it becomes a dedicated defence business sitting inside Joby rather than being absorbed into it.
Resonant's co-founder and chief executive, J. Micah North, will run the new division. It takes over the defence work Joby had been carrying itself — a turbine-electric aircraft, a hydrogen-electric one, and the autonomy stack underpinning both. Pulling that out into its own unit leaves the remainder of the company free to concentrate on what it is actually known for: certifying, manufacturing and launching an electric air taxi.
Joby's public identity has been built around that air taxi, a machine intended to move people and cargo over short urban hops. The defence ambitions are newer in public but not new in fact, and they have been surfacing steadily over the past two years.
In 2025 the company signed an agreement with L3Harris Technologies to look into a new class of aircraft together — specifically a gas-turbine hybrid capable of vertical take-off, landing and autonomous flight, intended for defence use. Joby said at the time that the aircraft would be built on the S4 platform it already had. The S4 has been developed with an all-electric powertrain, but in 2024, under a government contract, Joby demonstrated a hydrogen-electric hybrid version of it that covered 521 miles — more than twice the distance its battery-powered prototype could manage.
The commercial logic behind buying Resonant is plainer than the engineering. Resonant reports around $100 million in trailing twelve-month revenue and holds access to classified programmes run by the US government. Its sensing and radio frequency work also sits close enough to Joby's own aircraft to be useful rather than merely adjacent.
Revenue is the part that matters most. Designing an eVTOL, getting it certified and then producing it at volume is a process measured in years and financed the entire way. Frontier hardware of that sort holds shareholder attention until the conversation turns to when money starts arriving, at which point patience tends to thin quickly.
Joby has run this play before. It listed in 2021 by merging with a special-purpose acquisition vehicle, and has since gone hunting for income it can book in the near term rather than the distant one. During 2025 it bought Blade Air Mobility's helicopter rideshare operation for roughly $125 million. That purchase came with twelve terminals in genuinely useful places: John F. Kennedy International and Newark Liberty airports, two Manhattan sites on opposite sides of the island, and one down in the financial district.
More to the point, it came with money coming in the door. Of the $38.6 million Joby reported for the second quarter, $36.2 million originated with Blade.
