Elon Musk's The Boring Company has closed a $3 billion Series D funding round led by the United Arab Emirates, valuing the tunneling startup at $23 billion — roughly four times the roughly $5.7 billion valuation it commanded in its previous round in 2022, and among the largest venture checks of the quarter.
The UAE and its affiliated investment entities were joined in the round by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Temasek, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Human Capital, Shamal Holding and Baron Capital, according to TechCrunch.
The capital is earmarked chiefly for building more than 150 kilometers of underground tunnel infrastructure across the UAE, extending work already under way through the Dubai Loop project. Boring Company also plans to use the funds to expand its Loop projects in Las Vegas and Nashville, further develop its Prufrock tunnel-boring machines, and hire more staff across engineering, production and operations.
Underground Ambitions Go Global
The round is one of the largest checks written for a transportation-infrastructure startup this year and reflects the UAE's continued appetite for direct stakes in high-profile U.S. technology and infrastructure ventures. Musk founded Boring Company in 2016 out of frustration with Los Angeles traffic, betting that narrower, cheaper tunnels bored by purpose-built machines could undercut the cost of conventional subway construction. Its existing network includes the Vegas Loop, which ferries passengers between Strip hotels and the convention center in autonomous Tesla vehicles, and a roughly 10-mile loop under construction beneath Nashville.
The deal lands amid a broader run of outsized venture rounds this quarter spanning AI infrastructure, defense technology and space ventures, as investors chase capital-intensive bets with the potential for government-scale contracts and long-dated, infrastructure-like returns.
For Boring Company, the near-term test will be execution: translating the fresh capital into tunneling progress in a market where it has yet to complete a public transit line, while continuing to build out its existing U.S. projects and prove that its tunneling costs can keep falling as it scales. Investors are effectively betting that a company still short of a finished mass-transit line can execute at a scale, and a valuation, more typical of an established infrastructure operator.
