“We have years of experience and literally hundreds if not thousands of interactions with the F.D.A. that we’d be happy to provide perspective on,” he said.

Juul is also gambling that other terms Altria agreed to will overcome public mistrust of the deal — including an agreement to allow Juul to advertise its product to smokers through package inserts in Altria’s cigarettes.

The deal comes as the F.D.A. escalates its crackdown on Juul and other e-cigarette makers. The agency’s commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, was initially a strong advocate for these new products, but has initiated a campaign to limit their reach now that youth vaping has soared.

The F.D.A. has been investigating Juul for months, and threatened to pull the devices off the shelves if the company couldn’t find a way to keep them away from teenagers. At the same time, Dr. Gottlieb is pushing to reduce nicotine in traditional cigarettes to nonaddictive levels, although Altria and other tobacco companies plan to fight the agency on that issue.

With this deal, Juul “suddenly has the resources to refocus from defense to offense,” said David Sweanor, an antismoking advocate who supports using electronic cigarettes as an alternative. “Instead of just trying to survive an onslaught from F.D.A. regulators and abstinence-only campaigners creating a moral panic about their product, they can move to rapidly expanding with a global orientation and funding the R&D necessary to disrupt ever more of the $800 billion global cigarette market.”

To counter the mounting criticism of its product, Juul has spent months hiring public relations firms and lobbyists to try to persuade regulators that the soaring teenage use was an accident, not a deliberate marketing strategy. Juul changed the name of some of its flavors, took others out of stores and secured the services of Washington’s best-connected lobbyists and image consultants.

Any progress in improving its image among public health advocates may be greatly diminished with this deal.