Musk's Boring Company snags $3 billion in latest fundraise

Add another notch to Elon Musk's fundraising exploits.

The Boring Company, Musk's tunnel-digging startup, announced it raised $3 billion in a Series D funding round, valuing the company at $23 billion. The latest round is led by the UAE and its various investment entities, with funds earmarked to expand an existing partnership to "deploy mass quantities of underground infrastructure across the United Arab Emirates (UAE), including 150+ kilometers of tunnel," the company said. This is separate from the Dubai Loop project that will start later this year.

In addition to the UAE, the other key investors in the round are a who's who of venture capital and private equity players, including Human Capital, Vy Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, A16Z, Temasek, Shamal Holding, and Baron Capital.

Boring notes that its new "Prufrock" tunnel-boring platform is the future of boring large volumes of earth to create tunnels for traffic and infrastructure. The company said in August this year that it successfully implemented a fully autonomous partial tunnel build, which is likely where the industry is headed with zero-people-in-pit (ZPIT).

To date, the only operating tunnel system created by Boring is the "Vegas Loop" in Las Vegas, which added new stations at Westgate, Encore, Fontainebleau, and Sahara Las Vegas, with an airport connector opening soon. Boring says 4 million passengers have used the service.

Boring says the next project, in addition to work in the UAE, will be the "Music City Loop" in Nashville that was announced last year. The Music City Loop will connect Nashville with Music City Center, Lower Broadway, and Nashville International Airport. Work began in February of this year.

Critics of Boring Company question whether the tunnels actually solve traffic issues , as they can only move so many people given their size and the number of vehicles that can pass through them, in addition to concerns about the complexity, environmental costs , and regulatory hurdles in construction.

Nevertheless, the latest fundraising round comes on the heels of Musk's massive SpaceX IPO, which raised $75 billion in the largest public offering ever. Prior to its IPO, SpaceX raised around $12 billion in private money per KeepTrack , a space-economy blog.

Pras Subramanian is Lead Transportation Reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram .