Elon Musk's The Boring Company now valued at nearly $5.7 billion

Elon Musk's The Boring Company now valued at nearly $5.7 billion

The Boring Company, Elon Musk's bid to beat visitors with the aid of inserting Teslas in tunnels, has raised $675 million, which it plans to use to construct extra of its Loop projects.

The Boring Company's new funding, introduced Wednesday, comes from mission capital companies as nicely as actual property companies. Sequoia, a distinguished Silicon Valley company it's invested in Musk before, co-led the funding with Vy Capital. The deal values the Boring Company at almost $5.7 billion.

Loop is a frequently underground transportation gadget that provides point-to-point journeys between stations the place humans board Tesla SUVs. One Loop device is already working in Las Vegas with three stations and 1.7 miles of tunnel at the Las Vegas Convention Center. There are plans to make bigger the device in the course of the Vegas strip, with fifty one stations over 29 miles.

The Boring Company is additionally growing a challenge in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and is in conversations with San Antonio, Texas. It's formerly introduced tasks in Chicago, Washington, DC and Los Angeles, however has now not carried out them. It confronted a lawsuit from sad Los Angeles neighbors, and fell out of want when Chicago elected a new mayor. Permits have no longer been carried out for its DC to Baltimore project, which dates lower back to 2017.

"We're nonetheless very enthusiastic, and choose to go forward," Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis informed CNN Business on Thursday.

He stated the authorities is participating with the Boring Company on engineering problems on the project, which would join downtown and a close by beach. They're working to align the route on a proper of way that the metropolis has greater manipulate over. He declined to say when it would possibly be completed.

Critics have wondered if surely going for walks a subway system, however with vehicles alternatively than trains, is an environment friendly use of tunnels, which can value as lots as $1 billion per mile to build. The Boring Company says it is growing more cost-effective tunneling technology, and argues its machine is ideal to typical subway structures due to the fact journeys will be point-to-point, and now not make any deliberate stops, like at different stations. (But they should doubtlessly be slowed with the aid of tunnel site visitors in advance of them.)

Musk, the CEO of Tesla, in the past pitched a extra grandiose imaginative and prescient for the Boring Company, with human beings being whisked thru cities in devoted independent automobiles at speeds up to one hundred twenty mph. But the fact so far, in Las Vegas at least, has worried human drivers working what resemble preferred Teslas at 35 mph.

The Boring Company nevertheless says it plans to subsequently transition to wholly self sufficient operations, which will decrease the price of operations.

Sequoia stated in a weblog put up that the Boring Company is at an "inflection point."

"The subsequent few years are about 10x'ing overall performance by using making their structures swiftly reusable and wholly autonomous," it wrote.

The Boring Company says its subsequent technology desktop for digging tunnels is designed to be succesful of running remotely and autonomously, requiring no one in the tunnel. Its present day generation of the machine, referred to as Prufrock, is designed to dig up to a mile per week. Digging tunnels faster is fundamental to reducing costs.

The Boring Company has stated it additionally plans to construct utility and freight tunnels. It did now not reply to a request for comment.