Boring Company Gets Funding, Talks Hyperloop
Another round of funding has secured over $675 million for The Boring Company (TBC), Elon Musk’s infrastructure company.
In a press release, TBC said that a series of investors were able to support them during their Series C funding round, pushing the company to $5.675 billion in value.
TBC is reportedly going to use this money to run its new high-powered boring machine - Prufrock.
“Prufrock is a next generation Tunnel Boring Machine designed to construct mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks instead of years, and at a fraction of the cost. The current iteration of Prufrock, called Prufrock-2, is designed to mine at up to 1 mile/week, meaning a tunnel the length of the Las Vegas strip (approximately 4 miles) can be completed in a month. Prufrock-3 is designed to be even faster, with the medium term goal of 1/10 human walking speed, or 7 miles/day. In the short term, if each Prufrock-2 mines at 1 mile/week, and TBC produces 1 new Prufrock machine per month, then TBC will be introducing 600 miles/year of capacity. As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.”
The first use of this machine will likely be the Las Vega Convention Center Loop, which was recently approved for a major expansion; but municipalities in California, Florida and Texas are also in talks for new Loop systems.
That’s a lot of gains, but TBC didn’t stop there.
In a recent tweet, the Company announced that work was once again being started on Hyperloop - the vacuum-tubed train system that Musk’s companies and Virgin have both tried developing with mixed success.
Hyperloop is designed as an “ultra-high-speed” public transportation system, where folks would be seated in automated cars in a sealed tube, allowing for the vehicles to reach speeds of over 600 mph. A proposed DC to New York track would take less than 30 minutes according to The Boring Company, who would be making the system.
And considering how outmoded our current train system is in North America, we’re in desperate need of something to viably compete with super-polluting aeroplanes.