Billionaire Richard Branson on Thursday placed another bet on the future with an investment in Hyperloop One, which is developing super high-speed transportation systems.
Hyperloop One said Mr Branson’s Virgin Group would take the company global and rebrand itself as Virgin Hyperloop One in the near future.
Branson explained the reasoning in an interview with CNBC.
"As a train owner, I felt this is something that I want to be able to operate," Branson said. "At the moment our trains are limited to 125 miles an hour... There are consumers, for instance, that would love to go from London to Edinburgh in roughly 45 minutes. And that will be possible [with hyperloop]."
Mr Branson has joined the board of Hyperloop One, which will develop pods that will transport passenger and mixed-use cargo at speeds of 250 miles per hour (402 km per hour).
The pod lifts above a track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to low aerodynamic drag.
The company did not disclose the size of the investment.
Hyperloop One was originally conceptualised by Elon Musk. In July, Mr Musk said he had received verbal approval to start building the systems that would link New York and Washington, cutting travel time to about half an hour.
Last month, Hyperloop One raised $85m in new funding, bringing the total financing raised to $245m (£183m) since it was founded in 2014.
Hyperloop One’s co-founders, executive chairman Shervin Pishevar and president of engineering Josh Giegel, have previously worked at Virgin Galactic.
The idea for a hyperloop can be traced back to Elon Musk in 2013
Musk put out a challenge to the public to figure out how to travel from San Francisco to LA in just 30 minutes. Since then, several major competitors have stepped up to the plate. The most notable two come down to Hyperloop One and the Boring Company -- Musk's own venture. Initially, Musk wanted to focus on Tesla and SpaceX at the time. A series of tweets in 2016 led to his hyperloop company, and he shocked fans via Twitter by saying he'd build his own hyperloop between New York and Washington D.C.
While Hyperloop One is not affiliated with Musk in a formal business sense, Pishevar notes that Musk developed the idea. However, he's also very clear that as of now, his company has a full-scale hyperloop working. Branson's financial backing and entrepreneurial skills could help the new Virgin Hyperloop One land another major hurdle -- breaking ground on a government-approved project.
