With over a decade spent at the nexus of hardware innovation and venture capital, I’ve seen countless pitches for moonshot projects. What makes Boom Supersonic’s new venture into stationary power generation so fascinating isn’t just the technology itself, but the audacious business model underpinning it. It’s a bold attempt to solve the notoriously difficult problem of funding deep-tech hardware by creating a profitable, parallel business. This conversation will explore the strategic thinking behind this pivot, examining the high-stakes deal with their first customer, the immense manufacturing challenges they face, and how this side-venture is designed to bankroll their ultimate dream of supersonic flight.
Blake Scholl likened the Superpower turbine venture to SpaceX’s Starlink, noting he’d rejected thousands of other ideas. Can you describe the specific criteria that made this project the right one and walk me through the moment you decided to move forward with it?
For ten years, the search was on for a venture that wasn’t just a distraction but a direct accelerant. The key criterion that made this the “one” out of a thousand was synergy. This wasn’t about starting a completely unrelated software company or a consumer gadget brand; it was about leveraging the core intellectual property they were already bleeding cash to develop. The decision point, I imagine, was less a single eureka moment and more a dawning realization. When you see that the engine you’re painstakingly designing for a supersonic jet shares 80% of its parts with a turbine that can power the data centers popping up everywhere, the math starts to look very different. You’re not just building a plane anymore; you’re building an energy platform. That’s when it goes from being a potential distraction to being “so clearly on path,” as Scholl put it. It solves their biggest problem—funding—by using the very asset they were already building.
The article notes Crusoe is paying a premium at $1,033 per kilowatt. Could you elaborate on the unique value proposition you presented to secure this $1.25 billion deal and describe the key negotiations that led to Crusoe becoming your first major customer?
Securing Crusoe at that price point wasn’t just about selling a piece of hardware; it was about selling certainty and speed in a power-constrained world. Data center developers are in a frantic race, and their primary bottleneck is often securing power. Boom walked in offering a containerized, aeroderivative turbine that could be deployed relatively quickly, which is a massive advantage over waiting years for traditional power plant construction and grid hookups. The negotiation likely centered on Boom’s production roadmap. Crusoe wasn’t just buying 29 turbines; they were buying a guaranteed slice of a new, scalable manufacturing pipeline, with first deliveries slated for 2027. By getting in as the first major customer, Crusoe de-risks its own expansion plans for the end of the decade. They are paying a premium not just for the kilowatt, but for the strategic advantage of locking in a critical 1.21 gigawatts of power generation capacity years in advance.
With the Superpower and Symphony engines sharing 80% of their parts, what are the primary logistical and manufacturing challenges this creates? Please detail your step-by-step plan to scale production from the first deliveries in 2027 to hitting your 4-gigawatt goal by 2030.
That 80% parts commonality is both a brilliant efficiency and a monumental logistical headache. The core challenge is managing a supply chain that must serve two masters with very different demands: the ultra-high-precision, low-volume world of aerospace and the high-volume, cost-sensitive industrial energy market. The plan has to be methodical. The first phase, which they’re in now, involves producing the initial units at their existing facilities. This is the pilot program—it proves the tech and works out the early kinks. The next critical step, happening next year, is finalizing and building a much larger, dedicated factory. That’s where the real scaling begins. From there, it’s a steep ramp-up: they’re targeting 1 gigawatt of production in 2028, doubling to 2 gigawatts in 2029, and doubling again to 4 gigawatts in 2030. Each step requires a corresponding expansion of their supply chain, quality control, and assembly capabilities, all while ensuring the stationary turbine production doesn’t starve the Overture aircraft program of critical components. It’s a classic hardware startup “valley of death” scenario, but on an epic scale.
The turbine is launching with 39% efficiency, with a combined-cycle “field upgrade” in development. What is the technical roadmap and timeline for this upgrade, and can you explain the process and costs for customers looking to achieve that 60%-plus efficiency?
The roadmap is a smart, two-phase approach that gets a competitive product to market quickly. Phase one is the launch product: a simple-cycle turbine hitting 39% efficiency. That’s on par with existing competitors and meets the immediate need for fast, deployable power. Phase two is the “field upgrade” to a combined-cycle system, which is where they can really differentiate on efficiency, pushing it above 60%. This upgrade is not a simple software update; it’s a major construction project. It involves adding a whole secondary system to capture waste heat from the turbine’s exhaust and use it to generate more electricity. The timeline for this will naturally follow the initial deployments post-2027. For a customer like Crusoe, the process would mean significant additional capital expenditure to build out this heat-recovery infrastructure around the core turbine they already purchased. This would easily push their all-in cost north of the $2,000 per kilowatt figure, placing it in the premium category of combined-cycle plants.
You raised $300 million from prominent investors for this venture. How did you pitch this pivot from solely aircraft to stationary power, and what financial controls are in place to ensure these turbine profits directly fund the Overture aircraft’s development as intended?
The pitch to sophisticated investors like Ark Invest and Bessemer Venture Partners was likely a story of de-risking a moonshot. Instead of pitching a binary, high-burn venture with a single, distant payoff—the supersonic jet—they presented a hybrid model. They pitched an industrial-tech company with a massive, $1.25 billion anchor order from a credible customer, a clear path to generating revenue by 2027, and a defined manufacturing scale-up plan. This profitable energy business acts as an internal funding engine, a “Starlink” that can bankroll the capital-intensive R&D for the Overture aircraft without endless, dilutive fundraising rounds. To ensure this works, the financial controls have to be ironclad. You would structure Superpower as a distinct business unit with its own P&L. The profits generated from turbine sales are then contractually ring-fenced and allocated directly to the Overture program’s budget. This provides accountability and assures the investors who put in this $300 million that their capital is building a revenue-generating business that, in turn, fuels the larger vision.
