Commercial supersonic jet startup from Colorado bags $100 million

Boom, a maker of potentially commercial supersonic jets hailing from Centennial, Colorado, has just secured $100 million in funding.

According to a report from Crunchbase, the funding round that included more than $50 million in previously unreported investment was led by Laurene Powell Job’s Emerson Collective.

The company said that the latest Series B funding venture would allow it to expand on its Overture airliner. The Overture is touted as being “the world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner.”

“Building a supersonic airplane is not easy — but it is important,” Boom said in a company statement released after raking in $3 million in funding last March. “As we celebrate this milestone on our journey toward a supersonic renaissance, I’d like to share what motivates us at Boom: while we love the hard engineering and technical challenges, what really drives us is the enormous human benefit of faster travel.”

The company said after this latest funding round that it should be in line to have new planes ready by 2020 and could conduct test flights with its already available fleet by this year. CEO Blake Scholl also said that he expects to double the company’s workforce of 100 by the end of this year as well.