An earlier report from the Wall Street Journal (in July) already showed they’ve been in talks to raise around $4 billion this time. So, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Temasek, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Human Capital, Shamal Holding and Baron Capital joined the UAE (which led the funding) in the round.
“Defeating traffic is the ultimate boss battle,” Musk said in the announcement.
Why the UAE is involved
The Boring Company had signed an agreement with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority on February 3, at this year’s World Governments Summit, to build the Dubai Loop, a tunnel system for carrying passengers under the city. Its first phase runs about 4 miles and includes four stations, per the RTA, and the company says digging starts late this year. So the country leading the round is also home to the customer for the biggest project the money supports.
Also, the company puts the eventual scope of its UAE work at 93 miles of tunnel or more. The rest of the money goes to more engineers and production and operations staff, further work on its Prufrock boring machines, and expansion of the Loop systems in Las Vegas and Nashville.
Investors had to promise more than money
Some investors in this round agreed to send the company job candidates or to open doors with officials in cities it hopes to tunnel under, the Wall Street Journal reported. A backer who didn’t deliver could be made to sell some shares back. Musk confirmed the report on X with one word: “True.”
Where the machines are actually digging
Las Vegas is still the only place anyone can ride a Boring Company tunnel. More than 4 million passengers have used the Vegas Loop, by the company’s count, and the city of Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County have approved plans for 68 miles of tunnel and 123 stations.
In Nashville, the Tennessee Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration approved the company’s lease and permit for the Music City Loop on February 25, and digging began that same week. By September the company was showing two of its Prufrock machines cutting limestone under the city at once.
Chicago never got that far. Mayor Rahm Emanuel picked the company in 2018 to build a 12-minute express service between downtown and O’Hare, funded entirely by the company. No contract was ever signed, and the Wall Street Journal this month listed Chicago among the cities where the company has pitched projects. In Ontario, California, the company proposed a roughly $60 million airport tunnel in 2019, then dropped it in 2022 when the county’s transportation authority asked for an independent study of its impacts. The Alamo Regional Mobility Authority in San Antonio chose the company’s bid in March 2022 for a tunnel between the airport and downtown.
The company never signed the development agreement, stopped returning the agency’s calls, and the plan was written off as dead. Fort Lauderdale, Florida, accepted the company’s plan for a downtown-to-beach tunnel in 2021 and paid $375,000 toward feasibility studies the following June — the city’s last action on the project, a spokesperson said months later.
Musk set the company up inside SpaceX in 2017 and made it a separate business in 2018. The company calls Dubai its first construction contract outside the U.S., with machines due underground before the year is out.
Moneywise reached out to The Boring Company for comment on the new round, its earlier U.S. projects and the investor terms, but the company didn’t immediately respond by publication time.
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