Archer buys up Lilium’s patents

The takeover of the insolvent air taxi developer Lilium by the relatively unknown holding company AAMG has apparently failed: instead, the insolvency administrator has sold Lilium's patent portfolio to its US rival Archer. This means that a revival of Lilium is likely to have failed once and for all.

Since the beginning of August, the Ambitious Air Mobility Group (AAMG), based in the Netherlands and with connections to Spain, Dubai and Japan, has been loudly touting its desire to take over and revive the Bavarian company Lilium. However, this attempt has now apparently failed: with the sale of Lilium’s intellectual property in the form of over 300 patents to US competitor Archer, AAMG now has no chance of acquiring what are arguably Lilium’s most important assets.

The Lilium patent portfolio includes innovations in the areas of high-voltage systems, battery management systems, aircraft design, flight control systems, electric propulsion systems, propeller technology and shrouded propeller technology for eVTOL aircraft. “Lilium’s pioneering work advanced the frontier of eVTOL design and technology, and we’re excited to bring their cutting-edge technologies into the fold at Archer as we advance our product roadmap,” said Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer, on the acquisition of the patents.

Archer is paying €18 million for the patents. Lilium’s insolvency administrator, Ivo-Meinert Willrodt from the law firm Pluta said: “After lengthy negotiations in a complex transaction process, Archer prevailed in the bidding competition.” In addition to Archer, its US competitor Joby Aviation is also said to have bid for Lilium’s patents. And so did the aforementioned AAMG Holding.

AAMG – a small company with very active PR – is not particularly pleased about the award to Archer and immediately issued a press release entitled ‘Ambitious Air Mobility Group objects to the sale of Lilium assets’. In it, AAMG complains that it had “submitted a fully compliant, financially secured offer to acquire all assets of Lilium GmbH and Lilium eAircraft GmbH as part of the procedure established by the insolvency administrator.”

AAMG wanted to pay €30 million for everything

Furthermore, the insolvency administrator had now opted for an apparently unsecured offer from a listed US company of €18 million for limited intellectual property rights. This offer was significantly lower than AAMG’s secured offer of €23 million, which had then been increased to €30 million for the entire assets. Although the asset manager had confirmed in writing that the assets would go to the highest bidder, this was now ‘clearly not the case’. Accordingly, AAMG is ‘deeply disappointed’.

Lilium is considered one of the pioneers in the field of air taxis. The company was founded in 2015 by engineers and doctoral students from the Technical University of Munich. Investors poured €1.5 billion into the Bavarian start-up in the following years. However, given the years of certification processes in the industry, Lilium ran out of steam in 2024, and the startup filed for insolvency last October. It was then rescued by a new investor at Christmas. But only supposedly: the deal fell through, and Lilium finally went bankrupt again in February. In August, the aforementioned offer from AAMG became known.

Archer Aviation, on the other hand, was founded in California in 2018, but has made much more progress: the first flights are scheduled to take place in Abu Dhabi as early as next year. Archer also works for the US military.

Source: info via email, archer.com, manager-magazin.de, wiwo.de, handelsblatt.com (last three in German)

This article was first published by Florian Treiß for electrive’s German edition