Its name is a riff on the Greek god of travel and commerce, but Hermeus is no myth.

The Chamblee-based aerospace engineering start-up, co-founded by AE alumnus A.J. Piplica, has an indisputably real plan to revive commercial hypersonic air travel within a decade - maybe sooner. Piplica and his co-founders have their sights set on designing and building an aircraft capable of traveling at a MACH 5 speed for up to 4,600 miles  - a speed that would slice the New York-to-London route down to just 90 minutes. Their plans include only minimal changes to current aviation infrastructure.

"We've just finished our seed funding, which went well, and we should be able to test a prototype engine by the end of the year," said Piplica of the company he co-founded with Mike Smayda, Skyler Shuford, and Glenn Case in November of 2018.

"By this time next year, we should have 10 more employees working with us to start designing the hardware."

If Piplica's words sound ambitious, they are also realistic. He and his co-founders learned the art of launching a start-up from Dr. John Olds, the former AE professor who has started two booming businesses, SpaceWorks and Generation Orbit. All four of Hermeus's founders worked with Olds at Generation Orbit (GO).

"It was a fairly contained environment, as start-ups go, because GO was a subsidiary of another successful company, SpaceWorks, but John [Olds] took a calculated risk by letting me take it as far as it would go," said Piplica, who served as the chief operating officer and, later, as the chief executive officer for GO.

"At GO, we were working on single-stage rocket design for a project that would ultimately be around $15 million. But we all knew that building a rocket was not the only thing we had to do; we had to build a company. I'd earned a certificate in entrepreneurship as an undergrad at Tech, but working at GO drew on business skills I had to learn by doing. I’d never hired anyone. I’d never fired anyone. And now I was playing with dollars that could buy my house many times over."

Out of this pressure, Piplica and his team formed their own marching orders.

"There are obviously a great number of ways you can fail in business and far fewer ways you can succeed. Working with John [Olds] at Generation Orbit taught us all to concentrate on the latter, to focus on the ways it can work. Persist."

Persistence - and a belief in their concept - have been staples for Hermeus's co-founders, who have spent most of the last six months wooing venture capitalists with their plans.

"We knew not too many venture capitalists had seen a hypersonic aircraft company come across their desks, so we went to venture capitalists who we knew would not be interested in our project to get their feedback. They could tell us freely what we needed to do to make our ideas attractive. We needed to understand how to lay out the program in a way that investors would find it fundable. We had to come up with a time horizon of less than 10 years, ideally less than five. And we had to be able to promise a return 100x."

That's a return that would be 100 times greater than the initial investment.

Piplica does not blink at these numbers. In fact he continues with even larger ones.

"We needed to pitch a large enough market to support a billion-dollar valuation, which is totally reasonable if you run the numbers. Billions are spent every year on business-class, long-haul, over-water travel. Plus, you have to remember that, for a venture capitalist, a market that's tens of millions is just not big enough to justify their risk. Venture capitalists expect failure from a lot of the companies they fund, so the one that succeeds has to be able to succeed big. We think we can be that company"

Piplica estimates that he and his colleagues made a few hundred cold calls and held more than two-dozen face-to-face meetings and video conferencing calls with potential investors. All of this was done from their kitchen tables, basement offices, or local coffee shops. They didn't have an office until May of 2019.

But they did have drive.

"I was at a point in my career -- and I think we all were - where it was time to strike out on our own. We were all in our early 30's, and we knew that if there was going to be a time do it, it was now. I'd  spent the last ten years working on things that fly fast --rockets and satellites - and it felt like launching a business that focused on hypersonic travel was what I was meant to do."

From a practical standpoint, the most important move they made was to recruit industry experts for their board of advisors.

"It changed the sort of conversations we could have with investors," Piplica said. "There was a level of credibility that we wouldn't have had otherwise. People listened to us because we had smart people backing our plan."

Piplica  won't say how much Hermeus has secured, but it was enough to fund the initial stage of their business plan. After testing their prototype engine they will build a prototype airframe, install it, and test. And test again. And...

"The long-term vision of the company is to create a truly connected planet," said Piplica.

"Today, digital communication is almost completely ubiquitous across the planet, but being face-to-face is still important to business. And so is time. So when we look at business on a global scale, we see that there's a market for increasing the speed of transportation between the world’s major cities. It's the speed of business. Our first long-term goal is to cross the Atlantic in 90 minutes, but there are a lot of other things we see coming from that."

Stay tuned.

Connecting the Globe...Faster. Hermeus founders and advisors (left to right): Glenn Case (founder), Rob Weiss, Katerina Barilov, Mitch Free, Keith Masback, Rob Meyerson, AJ Piplica (founder), Dr. George Nield, Mike Smayda (founder) and Skyler Shuford (founder). While at Tech, Piplica studied under professors Lakshmi Sankar and Stephen Ruffin.