Elon Musk's tunneling venture, the Boring Company, has raised $3 billion in a Series D round that values the closely held startup at $23 billion, with the United Arab Emirates and its affiliated investment entities leading the round.
The financing, announced Thursday, marks roughly a fourfold jump from the company's last disclosed valuation of $5.7 billion in 2022, when it raised $675 million. Other participants in the new round include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Temasek, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Human Capital, Shamal Holding and Baron Capital.
The company said the capital will fund an expanded partnership with the UAE covering more than 150 kilometers, or roughly 93 miles, of underground tunnels — building on the Dubai Loop project the Boring Company is already constructing under a definitive agreement with Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority. The pilot phase of that project is a four-mile route with four stations linking the Dubai International Financial Centre and Dubai Mall, at an estimated cost of $154 million.
Musk framed the raise in typically outsized terms, writing that "defeating traffic is the ultimate boss battle" and that "even the most powerful humans in the world cannot defeat traffic."
Gulf capital, US ambitions
The deal fits a broader pattern this year of Gulf sovereign and state-linked investors bankrolling Musk's ventures and other capital-intensive US startups, from AI data centers to space and tunneling infrastructure. For the Boring Company, which has moved more slowly than promised on flagship US projects such as the Las Vegas Loop, the UAE tie-up hands it a large, government-backed customer willing to fund tunnel construction at scale — even as questions persist about the commercial viability of underground transit systems outside a handful of dense urban cores.
The round also underscores how venture investors remain willing to write outsized checks for infrastructure bets tied to Musk, even in categories like tunneling that have historically struggled to attract growth-stage capital independent of his other companies' halo effect. The step-up follows a run of similarly outsized valuations for Musk-linked ventures this year, as backers bet that his ability to attract government and sovereign-fund capital can offset the slower timelines and higher costs that have dogged physical infrastructure projects compared with the software startups venture investors are more accustomed to funding.
