A federal judge in San Francisco has rejected air taxi startup Wisk Aero’s request for a preliminary injunction against rival Archer Aviation, the latest development in a bizarre legal dogfight between the two deep-pocketed startups.
Wisk Aero, backed by Boeing and Google co-founder Larry Page’s company Kitty Hawk, wanted to keep its rival Archer from using any of the trade secrets it alleges were stolen.
In his ruling filed on Thursday, US District Court Judge William Orrick wrote that “Wisk has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits that defendant Archer Aviation Inc. has misappropriated its particular asserted trade secrets.”
However, the judge also acknowledged that there were “some arguable indications of misappropriation.”
Archer took the opportunity to blast Wisk.
“The record makes it clear that Wisk has provided no evidence — not a single document, not a single witness — that Archer ever received or used any Wisk trade secret,” Archer’s deputy general counsel Eric Lentell said in a statement.
“Wisk’s charges of massive theft are based entirely on conspiracy theories and outright misrepresentations of the actual record,” he added.
Despite the legal hit, Wisk said it intends to take the case to trial.
“We are in the very early stages of a long legal process, with in-depth evidence-gathering now to begin, and we fully intend to hold Archer accountable at trial,” the company said in a statement.
Wisk first sued Archer this spring for allegedly ripping off its electric-powered airplane design after it hired away several of the company’s engineers in December 2019 and January 2020.
But last month, Archer — whose investors include United Airlines and the auto giant that controls Fiat-Chrysler and Ferrari, as well as Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez — argued that Wisk in fact stole the designs at the center of the case.
Both companies’ blueprints show plans for a nearly identical aircraft using a “12-tilt-6” design — meaning the plane would have 12 rotors on a fixed wing, six of which can rotate downward in order to allow it to take off vertically. This would be a key advantage for an air taxi, allowing the craft to take off and land in crowded environments.
Archer, which in February announced plans to go public through a $3.8 blank-check deal, pointed to a December 2019 meeting in which the company’s co-founders Brett Adcock and Adam Goldstein allegedly approached Wisk’s Chief Engineer Geoff Long in Palo Alto as part of an attempt to convince him to defect to their company.
During the December 2019 meeting, Adcock and Goldstein allegedly revealed to Long that Archer was developing an aircraft using the 12-tilt-6 design. The co-founders reportedly believed they told Long about the plan in confidence as part of their plant to recruit him — and were shocked when Wisk filed its patent application for a 12-tilt-6-style plane in January 2020, just six weeks after their conversation.
Earlier this month, Wisk had a different version of events, claiming that at the meeting Long “immediately recognized” the design Adcock and Goldstein were describing as Wisk’s design.
“Long was concerned, and he told Adcock and Goldstein that they were describing a Wisk design,” Wisk wrote in a filing last week. “Justifiably alarmed, Long conveyed what he learned to his superiors.”
One of the engineers Wisk accuses of stealing secrets is Jing Xue, who allegedly downloaded thousands of files before defecting to Archer. Xue denied having stolen secrets in an earlier Archer filing — but took the Fifth when Wisk asked him to testify under oath “because of a pending federal investigation,” according to last week’s filing.