BETA's Vermont Factory Spending Went Up Nearly Sevenfold. A Federal Bank May Cover the Rest
BETA Technologies beat its own revenue forecast for the second quarter and crossed 1,000 aircraft on order, the South Burlington electric aviation company reported Wednesday morning.
BETA Technologies’ revenue came in at $14.7 million against a guidance range of $8 million to $11 million — about a third above the top of what the company told investors to expect, and roughly two and a half times the $6.0 million it booked in the same quarter last year. BETA raised its full-year revenue guidance to $42 million to $50 million, up from the $39 million to $43 million it had held to since March.
The number that matters most to Vermont is further down. BETA spent $41.1 million on property and equipment in the quarter, up from $6.0 million a year earlier — nearly seven times as much. That is the South Burlington plant. The company expects to spend $150 million to $200 million on capital projects this year.
It wants a federal lender to pay for a large share of it.
What the billion dollars is for
On Aug. 4, BETA and the Export-Import Bank of the United States announced they intend to expand an existing financing relationship to as much as $1 billion, roughly $830 million of it new money on top of the $169 million EXIM approved in 2023 to build the South Burlington production plant.
EXIM is the federal government’s export credit agency. Its traditional job is financing foreign buyers of American goods, but the 2023 BETA loan came through a newer program called Make More in America, which opened EXIM’s long-term lending to domestic manufacturing projects whose output is destined for export. That is the door BETA went through then, and the one it would go through again.
The Aug. 4 announcement did not say what the money would be spent on. Wednesday’s earnings call did.
Chief Financial Officer Herman Cueto laid out a division of labor between BETA’s two pots of money: proceeds from last November’s stock offering fund research and certification work, while the EXIM financing would fund capital assets — buildings, equipment, tooling. Founder and CEO Kyle Clark returned to the point in his closing remarks, describing the arrangement as matching each kind of money to the kind of spending it suits.
For a reader in Vermont, that is the whole point. The federal financing under discussion is factory money, and the factory is here.
Cueto said BETA is still in talks with EXIM and has a meeting scheduled in the coming weeks to discuss increasing volume through the plant and expanding vertical integration. Nothing is signed.
Building the factory before the plane is certified
BETA’s aircraft are not yet certified by the Federal Aviation Administration, which means the company cannot sell them to ordinary commercial operators. Its production rate has not moved since last quarter.
Clark said that is deliberate. The most valuable work on the production floor right now, he told analysts, is securing long-lead materials, expanding vertical integration, staging production lines, qualifying suppliers, and bringing already-hired workers up to standard. He said BETA bought its autoclaves — the pressurized ovens used to cure composite parts — along with trim tools and ultrasonic inspection equipment early, because working under FAA oversight does not leave much room to change strategy quickly.
That is the bet the EXIM money would underwrite: build the capacity now, so that when the certificate arrives there is no second scramble to tool up.
Certification itself moved this quarter. BETA and the FAA settled a disagreement over how an existing rule applies to electric motors — a question of regulatory interpretation, not engineering, that had been holding up the H500A propulsion program. On the CX300, the conventional-takeoff aircraft, the FAA accepted the company’s complete set of compliance requirements, which BETA says is a first for the industry.
The Vermont jobs question
Neither the release nor the call gave a headcount, and no analyst asked.
Compass reported on Aug. 8 that BETA employed 1,008 people at the end of 2025, up from 902 six months earlier, and that the jobs language in the Aug. 4 announcement is written nationally — “hundreds of technical, high-quality U.S. aerospace and advanced-manufacturing jobs” — where the 2023 loan announcement counted 400 Vermont jobs specifically. BETA’s manufacturing is centered in South Burlington, but the company also runs a flight-test base across the lake in Plattsburgh, New York.
So the question the second quarter raises is not whether BETA is hiring. It is what share of the next wave lands in Vermont.
Nothing in Wednesday’s results answers that. What they do show is a company spending like one that expects to need the people: capital spending up nearly sevenfold year over year, a full-year capital budget of $150 million to $200 million, and a chief executive describing the current job on the factory floor as training the workers already hired.
There is a Vermont-sized complication behind the hiring. VTDigger reported in June that BETA’s chief information officer put the company’s January-to-June hiring at 420 people, and that Green Mountain Avionics in Middlebury estimates its staff has shrunk by about half since the South Burlington plant opened in 2023, with much of it going to BETA. Greater Burlington Industrial Corporation president Frank Cioffi described the underlying condition as a tight labor market that takes time to retrain into. In a state this size, a large aerospace expansion is partly addition and partly redistribution within a technical workforce that already exists.
What is paying the bills now
Aircraft sales are not carrying the quarter. Of the $14.7 million in revenue, $3.3 million came from products and $11.4 million from services. Two things drove the beat:
Charging infrastructure. BETA delivered against a 34-charger contract with the Florida Department of Transportation. Its network now runs to 138 sites.
The Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration program. Hybrid-electric propulsion work with GE Aerospace, conducted under a NASA program that this quarter produced a flight above 30,000 feet.
BETA also sells components to other aircraft manufacturers — motors, batteries, inverters, flight control computers — at margins Cueto put at 40 to 60 percent, higher still on the computers. Shortly after the quarter closed, the company sold flight control computers and software licensing to Horizon Aircraft, the third outside aircraft program to fly on BETA’s flight control computers.
The charging business also puts BETA on the same side of the table as a company that just got considerably larger. In July, BETA joined Archer Aviation and Macquarie Capital in a consortium to build up to 250 charging sites in California, Texas, Florida, and New York. On Aug. 10, Boeing sold three subsidiaries — including Wisk Aero, its own air taxi arm — to Archer in exchange for a stake in the company. Asked about the consortium Wednesday, Clark said airports are public-use facilities where the industry has to agree on a common charging standard, and that Archer brings knowledge of where to put chargers in major metropolitan areas that BETA does not have. Cueto said BETA has the only certified CCS charger suitable for electric aviation and expects the consortium to grow.
The costs
BETA lost $148.8 million in the quarter, about $1.6 million a day, and roughly $10 for every dollar of revenue. Research and development alone ran $122.4 million, more than eight times what the company took in.
It has the cash to absorb that for now: $1.48 billion on hand at the end of June. Against a full-year plan of $400 million to $445 million in adjusted losses plus $150 million to $200 million in capital spending, that is roughly two and a half years of runway before any EXIM money arrives.
Three figures point the other way.
Third-quarter revenue is guided to $8 million to $12 million, below the quarter just reported. A federal research program and a state charger contract do not repeat every quarter.
The loss forecast widened at the bottom. In May the company guided full-year adjusted losses of $355 million to $445 million. It now expects $400 million to $445 million, having cut off the better end of the range.
The order book grew by about ten aircraft. BETA reported 991 aircraft worth $3.9 billion in May and 1,001 aircraft worth $3.9 billion on Wednesday. Crossing 1,000 is a milestone; the dollar figure behind it did not move, and the year-end target of $4 billion is the same distance away it was three months ago.
What to watch
The financing is an intention, not a loan, and the path from here is public. The EXIM board has to vote; domestic loans of this size cannot be approved by staff. Loans above $50 million go to Congress in advance. Anything above $100 million is published in the Federal Register with at least a 25-day comment window — the one point at which a Vermonter can put something on the record about a federal loan to a Vermont factory.