The Boring Company, a tunnel construction firm, announced late Wednesday that it had raised $675 million in a fresh round of fundraising, bringing its valuation to nearly $6 billion.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, launched the company to build tunnels for low-cost transit between sites. Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, 8VC, Craft Ventures, and DFJ Growth were among the investors in the current investment round, which was led by Vy Capital.
The Vegas Loop, an electric high-speed public transit system in Las Vegas, is the company’s most well-known project. Prufrock, the company’s other major product offering, is designed to build big infrastructure projects in a few of weeks.
Earlier today, Elon tweeted,
Please consider working at The Boring Company!
Our goal is to solve traffic, which plagues every major city on Earth. https://t.co/1tHNhIo7sd
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 21, 2022
According to a statement from the firm, the investment will be used to assist employment across engineering, operations, and production in order to fast scale loop initiatives, such as the Vegas Loop, as well as investing in Prufrock and other projects’ research and development.
Elon Musk established or leads multiple companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink.
According to Crunchbase, the Boring Company last funded $120 million in July 2019.
Musk has ties to Sequoia for a long time. Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital backed X.com, an early Musk company that handled online payments, but Musk was ousted as CEO after the company merged with another startup and became PayPal due to management differences. Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia, was the chief financial officer at PayPal.
Boring has evolved from its inception in 2016, when its ambition was for long-distance transit across hundreds of kilometers. It now focuses on shorter travels within cities, with some cities being simpler to work in than others. Projects in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a link between Washington and Baltimore were all shelved, despite the Vegas project’s success.
TBC has constructed two loop travel tunnels in Las Vegas. It has also finished one tunnel in Los Angeles County for loop testing. Other tunnels are being discussed and planned at various stages.
As an early inspiration for the concept, Musk noted traffic congestion in Los Angeles and the limits of the city’s two-dimensional transportation network.
The Boring Corporation began as a SpaceX subsidiary before becoming a fully autonomous company in 2018. Musk owned 90% of the stock as of December 2018, with SpaceX holding 6% in exchange for the use of SpaceX resources during the startup of the company. The share split has shifted due to outside investments made in 2019.
