Bob Cramer's Blog

Talk about a high-flying startup: earlier this week I heard the story of Hermeus, a year-old Atlanta-based company working on a plane that will fly at 95,000 feet, travel New York to Paris in 90 minutes, and be commercially availability by 2030 or sooner.

Founded by a four-man team all in the thirties, this moonshot project is estimated to cost a nice round $1 billion, and the team has secured less than a quarter of one percent of the needed money from Khosla Ventures, a well respected west coast venture firm with a long track record in next-gen aviation.  They are confident that based on hitting ambitious milestones, the remaining funding will be easier to find than the micro seed money.

I write this as I sit in my cramped window seat on Southwest, flying around 500 mph, in an aviation mode that really hasn’t changed in more than 30 years.  The Concorde, probably the last great out-of-the-ordinary commercial aviation project, flew intercontinental for numerous years at MACH 2. The market never really developed as there were only 20 Concordes in service when a disastrous accident attributed to a design flaw led to permanently grounding the bird-shaped plane.

The Hermeus plane is being designed to fly at MACH 5.  It will carry 20 passengers and in the first iteration plans, it will have no windows, for either the pilots or the passengers.  Don’t worry, they won’t be flying blind as a series of outside cameras projected on Tesla-like screens will avail to the pilots and passengers might use virtual reality to see the curve of planet Earth as it whizzes by.

They won’t have long to look out because by the time they reach cruising altitude it will be almost time to start the descent on a trip the designers promise will incredibly smooth and quiet with similar G force that we all feel today.  Interestingly, the business model created uses the current cost of a one-way Business Class ticket, around $3,000. Current plane unit demand forecasts are in the 1,000 to 1,200 range shared between commercial and private ownership operators, and at $100 million a pop (my made up number), this undertaking could be quite profitable and sustainable.

Sometimes Atlanta startups get called out for thinking small but I offer up Hermeus as a game changer on that perspective.   It is just the type of thinking that we need to rally around and I salute the Hermeus team and their current and future investors on their vision and their guts to embrace such a challenge.