Dubai’s Vy Capital bets on Elon Musk’s Boring Company in $675-mn round
Dubai-based Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital have led a $675 million Series C round of funding into tech billionaire Elon Musk’s The Boring Company in a deal that values the tunnelling startup at $5.7 billion.
Vy and Sequoia were joined by Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, 8VC, Craft Ventures, and DFJ Growth.
The new round also includes strategic investments by Brookfield, Lennar Corp, Tishman Speyer and Dacra Development Corp.
The Boring Company said it will use the money to significantly add to its workforce across domains like engineering, operations and production. This, the company said, will help it scale its Loop projects and accelerate the research and development of Prufrock, its next-generation tunnelling machine.
“Please consider working at The Boring Company! Our goal is to solve traffic, which plagues every major city on Earth,” Musk, who is also the Tesla CEO, tweeted.
Incidentally, this investment comes even as Musk has made an audacious multi-billion bid to acquire all of Twitter and take it private, a move, that is being resisted by its other shareholders.
The Boring Company had received an approval in October last year to build a new system that would shuttle passengers in Tesla vehicles using a network of tunnels under Las Vegas.
This is not the first time Sequoia is backing a Musk company. X.com, a company led by Musk, which facilitated online money transfers, was backed by Sequoia’s Mike Moritz. The company was later merged with another company and became PayPal, following which Musk was fired as its chief executive officer.
