The Boring Company, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s project to build underground highways to ease traffic congestion, has raised a $675 million Series C round, bringing its valuation to $5.7 billion -dollars increased.
The round was led by Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, 8VC, Craft Ventures and DFJ Growth. The company says it will use the funds to significantly increase hiring in engineering, operations and production to build and scale Loop projects and research and development of Prufrock, its next-generation tunnel boring machine of the company to accelerate.
In October, The Boring Company (TBC) received its first permit to build a transportation system that would carry passengers in Tesla vehicles through a network of tunnels beneath Las Vegas beyond its current 1.7-mile footprint that currently serves as the campus of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) connects to a 29-mile route that would hit all the best tourist spots in Sin City. Operations on the updated Vegas loop are expected to begin later this year, according to the company.
While the announcement hints at other Loop projects in the works, TBC has not yet indicated if it is pursuing other projects. However, the company mentions that this type of transport architecture with increased drilling speed can be applied to intercity transport or what TBC calls Hyperloop.
This is where improvements to Prufrock come into play, an automated mining machine that can tunnel continuously without humans on the ground. The current iteration, Prufrock-2, can be mined at 1 mile per week, according to TBC. The company boasts that a tunnel the length of the Vegas Strip, about four miles long, can be completed in a month.
The next generation, Prufrock-3, is expected to tunnel at seven miles per day.
“In the short term, if each Prufrock-2 is phased out at 1 mile/week and TBC produces 1 new Prufrock machine per month, then TBC will introduce a 600 mile/year capacity,” the company said in a statement. “By comparison, fewer than 20 miles of underground subway tunnels have been built in the United States in the past 20 years.”