The race to win the high-speed international flight market has been in the works for decades. Some may even remember the original Concorde jet that could make transatlantic routes in under 3.5 hours. That was a vast improvement on the jets most of us ride, which take around eight hours to go from New York to Paris.
Now, there’s a new race — a hypersonic one.
Atlanta-based hypersonic jet company Hermeus, founded last year, is building speed on its startup runway with a round of seed funding led by Khosla Ventures and a few other private investors. It didn’t say how much the investment was, but it said the new money will help put the company on track to develop and test its jets, which aim to go from New York to Paris in 90 minutes. That’s 3,000 MPH — or Mach 5.
It appears to have the right team to do it. Its four founders — AJ Piplica, Glenn Case, Mike Smayda and Skyler Shuford — worked together at Generation Orbit, and others have experience working at SpaceX and Blue Origin. It announced an advisory board that includes Rob Meyerson, former president of Blue Origin; Rob Weiss, former GM of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works; and others with strong aerospace and aviation experience.
And they have their work cut out for them as companies like Boeing and HyperSciences are engineering their own hypersonic jet systems.
“We’ve set out on a journey to revolutionize the global transportation infrastructure, bringing it from the equivalent of dial-up into the broadband era, by radically increasing the speed of travel over long distances,” co-founder and CEO AJ Piplica said in a news release.
