Georgia-based hypersonic plane startup Hermeus moves HQ to California
Hermeus, a metro Atlanta hypersonic aircraft startup founded by a Georgia Tech graduate, is moving its headquarters to El Segundo, California.
The focus of the defense aviation company’s Atlanta facility will shift to production, and the news involves no layoffs of its 175-person Georgia workforce, spokesperson Kate Gamble told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Hermeus announced the switch Tuesday in conjunction with $350 million in Series C financing that brings its total valuation to $1 billion. The influx will allow Hermeus to scale up to production of a fleet of three aircraft, the company said.
“Atlanta is where we proved the concept, and it remains our production home,” according to Gamble. “As we scale from a single aircraft to a fleet, Atlanta will transition over the coming months as our hub for product manufacturing.”
Among Hermeus’ new investors are Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises’ venture fund and the Georgia Tech Foundation. Cox also owns the AJC.
“This new funding lets us build multiple aircraft at the same time and scale our manufacturing capabilities, adding more hardware richness and robustness to our program,” AJ Piplica, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times Tuesday, Piplica said the move was driven by the need to recruit California engineering talent.
Georgia’s talent base “is extremely aligned to large-scale aerospace manufacturing. Prototyping is a whole different world — different skill sets, different capabilities.”
Founded in Atlanta in 2018, Hermeus first raised seed funding in 2019. In 2021, the company won a $60 million contract with the Air Force for flight testing.
In 2021 it acquired a 110,000 square-foot facility near Doraville, promising to create “a world-class aircraft assembly building — including light manufacturing and structures testing.”
Hermeus says it employs more than 275 employees across locations in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Jacksonville.
Aerospace is Georgia’s top export, with Gulfstream Aerospace and Lockheed Martin among the largest employers.
Ember Bishop Bentley, executive director of the Georgia Aerospace and Defense Alliance, said in a statement the group is “glad that Hermeus plans to retain its Atlanta-based facility, where the entire space will now be primarily dedicated to production operations.”
Hermeus, which has had several contracts with the U.S. government, dubs itself “a venture-backed defense aviation company reclaiming the lost art of rapid iterative prototyping to build the fastest aircraft in the world today.”
The company is currently testing its largest and fastest aircraft to date, the Quarterhorse Mk 2.1, after a successful first flight last month.
The aircraft is one of the largest unmanned aircraft ever built and nearly three times larger, four times heavier and significantly faster than its predecessor, Hermeus said at the time.
“With the successful flight of Quarterhorse Mk 2.1, supersonic flight is now imminent,” the company said Tuesday.
About the Author
As a business reporter, Emma Hurt leads coverage of the Atlanta airport, Delta Air Lines, UPS, Norfolk Southern and other travel and logistics companies. Prior to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she worked as an editor and Atlanta reporter for Axios, a politics reporter for WABE News and a business reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
