Archer brings in finance expert to join its leadership team, hiring Ben Lu as Chief Financial Officer

With sev­er­al key appoint­ments being made over the last cou­ple of months, Archer has announced Ben Lu as its new Chief Finan­cial Offi­cer.

As the com­pa­ny’s first C‑suite lev­el finance hire, Lu arrives fol­low­ing a suc­cess­ful five-year peri­od at Log­itech, where he was VP of Finance and man­aged a glob­al finance team. This includes Cor­po­rate FP&A, Trea­sury, Investor Rela­tions and var­i­ous oth­er finance func­tions.

Lu joins an ever increas­ing team at Archer, after the com­pa­ny first appoint­ed 20 engi­neers from Aeri­on Super­son­ic fol­low­ing its clo­sure. Fol­low­ing this, Bob Ellithor­pe and Glen Burks joined as VP of Pro­gram Man­age­ment and VP of Man­u­fac­tur­ing respec­tive­ly, with Jeff Green­wood com­ing on board as Chief Flight Test Pilot and Dave Den­ni­son as VP of Engi­neer­ing.

In his new role at Archer — which was co-found­ed by Brett Adcock and Adam Gold­stein — his main respon­si­bil­i­ties will be to con­tin­ue grow­ing and over­see­ing the finance and investor rela­tions depart­ment. In par­tic­u­lar, Lu will over­see the company’s finances as it tran­si­tions to a pub­lic com­pa­ny fol­low­ing the com­ple­tion of the pro­posed busi­ness com­bi­na­tion with Atlas Crest Invest­ment Corp. This trans­ac­tion is cur­rent­ly expect­ed to close this fall.

Lu said: “My entire career has been focused on help­ing tech com­pa­nies scale by cre­at­ing strate­gic approach­es to finance and investor rela­tions. I am excit­ed and ready to step into this role for Archer. The com­pa­ny Brett and Adam have built is root­ed in an aspi­ra­tional vision of the future and I can’t wait to add to the exper­tise of the team that will make that vision a real­i­ty.”

As head of investor rela­tions, Lu led the team dur­ing a peri­od where Log­itech achieved a 10x increase in share­hold­er val­ue — from $2 bil­lion to $20 bil­lion.

They also helped the com­pa­ny scale rev­enues from $2 bil­lion in 2017 to more than $5 bil­lion in 2021. This was on top of increas­ing oper­at­ing prof­its five­fold from $238 mil­lion to $1.3 bil­lion over the same time peri­od.

Adcock said: “Find­ing the right CFO is no small task, but Ben’s past results and unique investor-dri­ven approach is exact­ly what Archer needs as we tran­si­tion from pri­vate­ly-owned start­up to a quick­ly-scal­ing pub­lic com­pa­ny. As we nav­i­gate the clos­ing of our merg­er with Atlas Crest, we’re thrilled to have Ben at the finan­cial helm, prepar­ing a strat­e­gy that can be imple­ment­ed on day one.”

Gold­stein added: “Brett and I have been hon­oured to wel­come so much new tal­ent into the Archer team, and Ben is cer­tain­ly no excep­tion as a stand­out in his field. At Archer we pride our­selves on assem­bling only the best, bright­est, and most pas­sion­ate and are thrilled to add Ben’s expe­ri­enced voice to our senior lead­er­ship team.”

Archer is on course to begin com­mer­cial ser­vices as ear­ly as 2024, unveiled its eVTOL air­craft Mak­er dur­ing a livestream event in Los Ange­les.