The Crowdsourced Company Building Elon’s Hyperloop Is Going Public

HTT/JumpStartFund

The company that’s working to bring Elon Musk’s Hyperloop to reality is going public, it announced this afternoon.

The Hyperloop, a revolutionary transit system that would shoot pods full of people around the country in above-ground tubes at 800 mph, was proposed by Musk in 2013. That timing lined up with the beta launch of JumpStartFund, a startup that combines elements of crowdfunding and crowd-sourcing to take ambitious ideas and move them toward reality. So JumpStartFund created Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc.

The company brought together a group of nearly 200 engineers all over the country who spend their free time spitballing ideas in exchange for stock options (which will now vest), and have day jobs at places like Boeing, NASA, Yahoo!, and Airbus. They and a group of 25 students at UCLA’s graduate architecture program are working on a wide array of issues, including route planning, capsule design, and cost analysis.

The Hyperloop Transportation Technologies direct public offering is planned for the third quarter of 2015, and the $100 million will be put toward developing a usable prototype. Before then, CEO Dirk Ahlborn plans to be able to prove the technology behind the project works, and “makes financial sense.”

The auction will be open to the general public, in keeping with the crowdsourced spirit of the whole project. “We don’t want it to be limited to accredited and institutional investors,” Ahlborn says, though they’ll certainly be providing some of the capital. “We want to give our community the possibility to participate.”