Hermeus, an Atlanta-based hypersonic jet company intent on making air travel five-times faster, has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Canaan Partners.
Rich Boyle, of Canaan Partners, will join the board of directors. Canaan Partners joins Khosla Capital, Bling Capital and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund as investors.
The funding will help Hermeus develop and test an engine that could power a Mach 5 aircraft, which can fly at more than 3,000 miles per hour, according to an Oct. 29 press release.
That speed would cut the flight time from New York to London to an hour-and-a-half rather than seven hours.
“Once we get that into the air, that type of engine — a turbine-base, combined-cycle engine — has never flown before up to the speed that we're talking about, so that'll be pretty cool to work on,” said Skyler Shuford, a founder and COO of Hermeus.
The aerospace company developed a successful engine prototype in February that it will scale up for the upcoming test run, according to the release. Once the engine is completed, Shuford said it’s a matter of getting the aircraft designed and built to go with it. Design details of what that first aircraft could look like are expected in the next few months.
Its Atlanta testing facility, located at the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport, will also be expanded to allow some in-house manufacturing and testing and office space. Right now, Shuford said they’re working out of two shipping containers.
Hermeus was founded in 2018 by Shuford, CEO AJ Piplica, CPO Michael Smayda and CTO Glenn Case. The founders started the company in Atlanta and stayed because of the city’s reputation of being a logistics and transportation hub.
Shuford said they wanted to help innovate the speeds of the aerospace industry, which has stayed fairly stagnant since the 1950s. There was a market and national interest in increasing air travel speeds, so Hermeus hopped into the game.
Though Boeing and other large aerospace companies also have plans to go hypersonic, Shuford said the startup isn’t worried about the competition.
“Because we’re small, nimble, growing, we can control our entire value chain and do it much more efficiently and at a smaller, more incremental scale,” Shuford said.
