https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaiXnw77bg4

Elon Musk's The Boring Company gets a big boost in its efforts to revolutionize the Tunnel Boring Machine technology.

"Our Series C funding round of $675 million, led by Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, 8VC, Craft Ventures, and DFJ Growth. The financing now values The Boring Company at $5.675 billion" announces the company.

The Boring Company is getting more and more popular in US with their tunneling technology. The company has built the famous Las Vegas Loop tunnel. That triggered many cities to get interested in in Elon Musk's company to build tunnels for them.

The company annoucement says the funds from the round will be used to significantly increase hiring across engineering, operations, and production to build and scale Loop projects, including Vegas Loop and others, in addition to accelerating the research and development of Prufrock and future products.

Prufrock is especially interesting Tunnel Boring Machine development project. Elon Musk has in the past claimed, Prufrock TBM aims to speed-up TBM advance rate in the order of 10-15 times.  The development is in its early phases with The Boring Company announcement sets the excavation speed of the second iteration of the TBM "Prufrock-2" at 1 mile/week.

The company announcement writes:

TBC creates safe, fast-to-dig, and low-cost transportation, utility, and freight tunnels. TBC has spent the last 5 years building core technologies designed to solve traffic and beautify our cities via Loop and Hyperloop.

Loop is an all-electric, zero-emissions, high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported to their destination with no intermediate stops. TBC’s first major Loop project, Vegas Loop, is located in Las Vegas Nevada. On October 20, 2021, the Clark County Commissioners unanimously approved Vegas Loop, a 29-mile tunnel network connecting 51 stations. Vegas Loop is the largest subsurface transportation project in the United States. Vegas Loop will enable safe, low cost, and high speed transportation throughout Las Vegas, targeting throughput of up to 57,000 passengers per hour. For end users, this means a trip from Harry Reid International Airport to any major destination on the Las Vegas strip in 5 minutes or less with zero stops. This also translates to less congestion overall on traditional surface roads. Vegas Loop is enabled by TBC’s proprietary tunnel boring machine called 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 core technological innovations driving Prufrock’s progress are:

• Porpoising: Prufrock is designed to “porpoise,” meaning it launches directly from the surface, mines underground, and re-emerges upon completion. This allows Prufrock to begin tunneling within 48 hours of arrival onsite, eliminating the need to excavate expensive pits for launch and providing the capability to ultimately retrieve the machine for rapid reuse. 

• Continuous Mining: installing the tunnel’s precast segments simultaneously while mining eliminates the need to stop the TBM every five feet (these stoppages are standard on soft-soil TBMs)

• ZPIT (Zero People in Tunnel): unlike traditional TBMs which require upwards of a dozen or more people to operate, Prufrock is designed to be capable of operating completely remotely and autonomously via computerized systems and requires zero people in the tunnel to operate.

https://www.boringcompany.com/seriescround