Elon Musk’s The Boring Company announced that it has raised $675 million in a new funding round valuing the company at $5.675 billion. It plans to use the funds to build many new boring machines and dig tunnels under more cities.
The Boring Company (TBC) wrote in a press release:
Our Series C funding round of $675 million, led by Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, 8VC, Craft Ventures, and DFJ Growth. The financing now values The Boring Company at $5.675 billion.
It disclosed that the primary use of the funds is going to be accelerating hiring in order to scale current and upcoming Loop projects:
The funds from the round will be used to significantly increase hiring across engineering, operations, and production to build and scale Loop projects, including Vegas Loop and others, in addition to accelerating the research and development of Prufrock and future products.
TBC’s Loop is an all-electric, zero-emissions, high-speed underground public transportation system utilizing Tesla vehicles in tunnels.
Its first application is at the Las Vegas Convention Center, but the city of Las Vegas recently approved a major expansion of the system throughout the whole strip and to the airport.
In the release about the new funding, TBC explained how its latest tunnel boring machine is going to soon enable it to build about 600 miles of tunnels per year or 30 times more tunnels than in the last 20 years combined:
Prufrock is a next generation Tunnel Boring Machine designed to construct mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks instead of years, and at a fraction of the cost. The current iteration of Prufrock, called Prufrock-2, is designed to mine at up to 1 mile/week, meaning a tunnel the length of the Las Vegas strip (approximately 4 miles) can be completed in a month. Prufrock-3 is designed to be even faster, with the medium term goal of 1/10 human walking speed, or 7 miles/day. In the short term, if each Prufrock-2 mines at 1 mile/week, and TBC produces 1 new Prufrock machine per month, then TBC will be introducing 600 miles/year of capacity. As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.
On top of the project in Las Vegas, TBC is already in talks with several municipalities in California, Texas, and Florida for new Loop systems.
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