Specifically, a Mach 5 aircraft that will be capable of getting from New York to London in 90 minutes, about twice as fast as Concorde and five times the speed of current transatlantic flights.

But what gets Case, the co-founder of AOL, really excited is that Hermeus, the hypersonic aircraft he's backing, was founded by a Georgia Tech graduate and is based in Atlanta — not New York or Silicon Valley. 

"What they are doing is crazy," Case said Thursday during an event at Pegasus Park, a campus in Dallas for biotech companies. The company is tapping into the knowledge and skills of Georgia Tech and the fact that Atlanta is a center for aerospace, he said. "There's a reason to be there as opposed to 10 years ago when those graduates probably would have felt they had to go to California or some other place to start the company."