The Boring Company owned by Elon Musk is now worth nearly $5.7 billion

The Boring Company’s new funding, announced Wednesday, is coming from venture capital firms as well as from real estate firms. Sequoia, a prominent Silicon Valley firm that has invested in Musk before, co-led the investment with Vy Capital. The deal values The Boring Company at $5.7 billion.

Episode is mostly An underground transportation system that provides point-to-point trips between stations where people are riding in Tesla SUVs. single ring system It already operates in Las Vegas with two stations about a mile apart at the Las Vegas Convention Center. There are plans to expand the system throughout the Vegas strip, with 51 stations over a 29-mile span.

The Boring Company is also developing a project in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and is in talks with San Antonio, Texas. Previous projects were announced in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, but they were not completed. Faced with a lawsuit from dissatisfied Los Angeles neighbors, she lost popularity when Chicago elected a new mayor. permits for her not completed for its project from DC to Baltimore, which dates back to 2017.

“We’re still very excited, and we want to move forward,” Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis told CNN Business Thursday.

He said the government is cooperating with The Boring Company on engineering issues at the project, which will connect downtown and a nearby beach. They work to align the road on the right of way which is more controlled by the city. He declined to reveal when it would be completed.

Critics asked If operating primarily a subway system, but using cars rather than trains, it is an efficient use of tunnels, which can cost up to $1 billion per mile. The Boring Company says it is developing cheaper tunneling technology, and argues that its system is superior to traditional subway systems because the trips will be point-to-point, and not stop planning, as at other stations. (But they probably are Traffic slowed in the tunnels in front of them.)

Tesla CEO Musk previously offered a more complex vision for The Boring Company, transporting people through cities in dedicated self-driving cars at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour. But the reality so far, in Las Vegas at least, has involved human drivers running what looks like a standard Tesla at 35mph.

Boring still says it plans to eventually transition to fully independent operations, which will reduce the cost of operations.

Sequoia said in a blog post that Boring is at an “inflection point.”

“The next few years will be about 10 times the performance by making their systems quickly reusable and fully autonomous,” he wrote.

The Boring Company says the next-generation tunneling machine is designed to be able to operate remotely and independently, requiring no one in the tunnel. The current iteration of the machine, called the Prufrock, is designed to drill up to a mile per week. Tunneling faster is critical to reducing costs.

The Boring Company said it also plans to build utility and shipping tunnels. It did not respond to a request for comment.