Former Cisco president Rob Lloyd named Hyperloop CEO

That company now has gained someone very familiar to the channel at its helm, namely Cisco’s Rob Lloyd, who has been named as the company’s new CEO.

Lloyd worked for Cisco for 20 years, including as its president, and as an entrepreneur for 10. The organization says it as of now has 50 full time workers in a 55,000 sq. ft area in downtown.

“I’m hugely impressed by the team and the vision of this company and the brilliant team committed to making the Hyperloop a reality“. It has also brought in another well known figure into its list of advisors: Emily White, former COO of Snapchat and ex-Facebook executive.

“A network that doesn’t carry bits but transports atoms – people and things – all around the world”, he said. Lloyd replaces former HTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn, who also is co-founder and CEO of JumpStart Fund.

At Cisco, Lloyd – pictured below on Hyperloop Technologies’s site with TJ Ronacher, Shervin Pishevar and Brogan BamBrogan (L to R) – was in charge of the company’s worldwide business, while now he will be digging deep into one vertical, transportation, and forging global relationships and partnerships to build out Hyperloop infrastructure and services – a continuity that Lloyd, in a blog post, likens to the early days of building out the Internet.

Assuming Hyperloop Technologies closes the round – which has been open since at least February – it plans to complete construction of its test track by 2016 or early 2017, Lloyd says.

The Hyperloop is basically a transportation systems that connects two destinations via tube.

“Hyperloop is the fifth mode of transport and will be the most efficient transportation network ever seen”.

The firm, relying on the crowdsourcing approach, expects to announce major technology developments and partnerships next year.

“The amount of innovation happening within the walls of our office every day is astounding”, said Brogan BamBrogan, CTO and co-founder, Hyperloop Technologies Inc.

“The engineering is a certainty”, he told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” “This is going to be about execution and turning Hyperloop into a reality”.

If the test track goes smoothly, the next step will be to partner with governments around the world to build real, functioning Hyperloops. “We look forward to 2016 being our Kitty Hawk moment”. Hyperloop is endeavor upheld by Formation 8, Sherpa Ventures, Zhen Capital, Caspian VC, David O. Sacks, and others. And to that end, it says it is now raising $80 million in a Series B round of funding.

A pair of companies took him on, with confusingly similar names – Hyperloop Technologies and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.