Boom Supersonic has raised $100 million from an array of Silicon Valley investors to help it build a supersonic airliner. It’s a large amount of money by tech industry standards but only a small step in aerospace down a road that will require billions of dollars more to realize Boom’s vision.
The Series B round brings Boom’s total funding to $141 million. The round was led by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective and includes the Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Caffeinated Capital and SV Angel, as well as unnamed founders and early backers of Google, Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox.
Boom is one of three upstart companies seeking to reboot supersonic flight for civilians. Aerion and Spike are developing business jets while Boom is aiming larger: a 55-seat, three-engine commercial plane. Essentially its plan is to slice off airlines’ business class cabins and deliver that lucrative clientele to their destinations at Mach 2.2—and at identical or lower airfares.
Boom is naming the plane Overture, founder and CEO Blake Scholl tells Forbes, because he believes it will be just the first in a series of airliners that will be progressively more affordable, larger and faster. “The vision here is to make supersonic travel mainstream,” says Scholl.
Scholl’s business case is pegged on projections that about 65 million passengers a year will be flying business class on transoceanic routes by the mid-2020s. He says that would mean a market for 1,000 to 2,000 Overture jets over the decade from Overture’s anticipated launch date of 2023, at a list price of around $200 million apiece. If new supersonic aircraft designs that can dampen sonic booms convince regulators in the U.S. and other countries to end restrictions on overland flights, Scholl believes the market could be two to three times larger.
No comments:
Post a Comment