Tonic Boom: Jet gets $33M
Investors invigorate the development of a supersonic plane with a soaring tally.
So many investors wanted in on the supersonic jet in development in Centennial that Boom Technology decided to accept more funding than it set out to attract. It raised $33 million, the company plans to announce Wednesday.
“We now have all the money we need to go and build an airplane,” Boom CEO and co-founder Blake Scholl said.
The plane, of course, is no ordinary aircraft. It intends to travel faster than last century’s Concorde but will be smaller, lighter and cheaper. Boom says the future XB-1 plane will travel faster than the speed of sound and fly from New York to London in 3 hours, 15 minutes — at a cost, to travelers, of $5,000 round trip. The lure of faster, affordable travel enticed investors, but their attraction to Boom is a supersonic jet that is feasible and marketable.
“There has been extreme interest in Boom, not minor interest. Not paper airplanes either. Highly suitable investors and global airlines are looking at this. They see the disruptive nature of this airplane and they want to be part of it,” said Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group International, an aviation consulting firm in Evergreen that is not an investor. “The thing is with this entity, they (Boom) are not dreamers. These people don’t want to just put out a supersonic airplane. They’re looking at it from a market perspective, not a dreamer’s.”
Boyd’s company was hired by Boom last year to study the viability of supersonic flights for a wider audience. It projected Boom could sell 1,300 aircraft — Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is a partner and has options on future aircraft. Sales would more than double that if the U.S. and other countries ended bans of supersonic booms — the sound an object makes when it travels faster than the speed of sound — over land. Boom’s plane noise is at 85 decibels, slightly louder than a garbage disposal.
“Those who are discounting this are people saying there’s no engine available. Well, someone might want to call Rolls Royce, because they’re interested,” Boyd said. “The technology is there.”
Robert Olislagers, executive director of Centennial Airport where Boom is based, said the suburban Denver airport has long attracted startups working on interesting new technology. It’s where Dream Chaser spacecraft got its start before Sierra Nevada Space Systems acquired the technology and set up shop in Louisville. Another tenant, Bye Aerospace, is working on solar-electricity powered aircraft.
Boom’s twist on supersonic flight is that the company is looking for sustainability, Olislagers said.
“This is a more solid approach,” he said. “And beyond that, they have surrounded themselves with capable people and have not only
taken an idea that’s been around for a long time, but they’re taking advantage of newer technologies in engines and materials that will have a better chance of getting into production.”
Investors in this Series A $33 million round lined up to partake. The latest round, which brings Boom’s total funding to $41 million, includes investment from 8VC, Caffeinated Capital, Palm Drive Ventures, RRE Ventures and technology accelerator Y Combinator. Y Combinator president Sam Altman and Greg McAdoo, formerly with Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital venture firm, will join Boom’s board.
“When I first met with Boom, I was fascinated by their plans to revive supersonic flight, making the world more accessible for millions of people,” Altman said in a statement. “Since then, Boom has formed partnerships with aviation industry leading manufacturers and made rapid progress in the development of the demonstrator — I am excited to be part of the coming super- sonic renaissance.”
Boom went through Y Combinator’s accelerator in 2016. Back at its home at the Centennial Airport last fall, it unveiled a mockup of the XB-1, or “Baby Boom,” a two-passenger plane measuring 70 feet long. In January, using simulation and a 4-foot-long prototype, the plane successfully conducted wind-tunnel tests at Wichita State University in Kansas.
The design is complete, but actual flying tests need to be done, Scholl said. The full XB-1 prototype, which is one-third the size of the final aircraft, will be manufactured in North Carolina, brought to Centennial for initial flight tests and then undergo supersonic flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California later this year. Virgin Galactic will provide ground support during the supersonic tests.
“We’re about a year away from flying,” Scholl said. “Now that we have money, we’re unblocked to start building pieces of the airplane.”
The company is still on track to begin flying up to 45 passengers in its supersonic jet by the 2020s.
Scholl said the extra funding will be a safety cushion as Boom turns this dream into a reality. Boom isn’t developing cuttingedge new engine technology. It’s using the advances in aircraft design and materials that have popped up since the Concorde retired in 2003. The Concorde, which debuted in the 1970s, traveled 1,354 mph. Boom’s baby is designed to fly 1,451 mph, or Mach 2.2.
“We’re taking all the stuff that’s known and flying on other airplanes and the FAA knows how to test and approve. That makes it more affordable,” Scholl said. “We’re deliberately taking the approach of low-capital, lowrisk.
“We’re keeping the airplane itself small, at 150,000 pounds compared to a Boeing 787, which is half a million pounds. These things are big.”