The Boring Company

Dandy

The Boring Company

The Boring Company's business model is infrastructure contracting — they bid on tunnel construction projects and get paid by the clients (usually government agencies or private venues). Revenue comes from construction contracts for building the tunnels and from operating the transit systems within them.

The core economic thesis is that tunnel boring is absurdly expensive — typically $100 million to $1 billion per mile — because the technology hasn't meaningfully improved in decades. The Boring Company claims they can reduce costs by 10x through smaller tunnel diameters, continuous boring (no stopping to install tunnel walls), electric machines instead of diesel, and autonomous operation.

The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop was built for $47 million — about 1.3 miles of twin tunnels. That's roughly $18 million per lane-mile, which is genuinely cheap compared to traditional subway construction.

Whether that cost advantage holds at scale on larger, more complex projects remains unproven.

Dandy

Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.

Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.

As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.

The Boring Company

The Boring Company started, quite literally, with a tweet. In December 2016, Elon Musk was stuck in LA traffic and tweeted "Traffic is driving me nuts.

Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." Most people assumed he was joking. He wasn't.

Within weeks, Musk had a team digging a test trench in the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne, California. The initial concept was ambitious: a network of underground tunnels where cars would be loaded onto electric sleds and whisked through tubes at 150 mph.

Think the Hyperloop but underground and for individual vehicles.

The company was formally incorporated in late 2016 as a subsidiary of SpaceX. The name was classic Musk — a pun on both tunnel boring and the company's supposed boringness compared to rockets and electric cars.

Early funding came from Musk personally and from a surprisingly successful merchandise operation: The Boring Company sold 20,000 branded flamethrowers (rebranded as "Not-a-Flamethrower" for legal reasons) for $500 each in 2018, generating $10 million in revenue before they built a single tunnel.

Dandy

Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.

Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.

Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.

The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.

Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.

The Boring Company

The strategy is to prove the concept in Las Vegas and then replicate it in cities worldwide. The Vegas Loop is the showcase project — a real, operating system that city officials and transportation planners can visit and experience.

Las Vegas was a strategic choice. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority was a willing early customer.

Nevada has friendlier regulations than most states. The flat desert geology is easier to bore through than urban bedrock.

And tourism means high passenger volume to demonstrate utilization.

The plan is to expand from convention center shuttle to city-wide transit system. Clark County approved the full 68-mile Vegas Loop expansion.

If it works — moving tens of thousands of passengers daily, reliably, at low cost — it becomes the proof point for selling Loop systems to other cities.

Dandy

Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.

Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.

Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.

Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.

The Boring Company

The core criticism is that The Boring Company has essentially built a taxi tunnel, not a transit system. Traditional subways move thousands of people per hour in high-capacity trains.

The Vegas Loop moves people in individual Teslas — one car at a time. Critics argue this is fundamentally less efficient and will never match the throughput of real mass transit.

Scaling beyond Las Vegas is unproven. Urban tunneling in cities with existing underground infrastructure — sewers, subway lines, utility conduits, building foundations — is exponentially harder than boring through Nevada desert.

The cost advantages may not hold in complex geology.

The autonomous driving requirement is another dependency. The long-term vision requires fully autonomous vehicles navigating tunnels at high speed.

Currently, the Vegas Loop uses human drivers in Teslas going 35 mph. Removing human drivers and increasing speed are both necessary for the economics to work at scale, and both depend on Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology actually becoming fully autonomous.

Dandy

Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.

Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.

The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.

The Boring Company

Prufrock — the next-generation tunnel boring machine designed to bore at over 1 mile per week, compared to the industry standard of roughly 300 feet per week. The name comes from T.S.

Eliot's poem. Vegas Loop — the operational system under Las Vegas with 93 stations planned across the Strip, downtown, and the airport.

When complete, it would be a 68-mile network. Loop Transit System — the overall concept of small-diameter tunnels with autonomous electric vehicles providing point-to-point underground transportation.

Not-a-Flamethrower — technically a roofing torch in a Nerf gun shell. Sold 20,000 units at $500 each.

Not really a product anymore but too iconic to leave out.

Dandy

Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.

Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.

Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.

Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.

The Boring Company

Elon Musk funded the company initially from personal wealth. Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Craft Ventures, DFJ Growth, and 8VC participated in the $675 million Series C in 2022 that valued the company at $5.7 billion.

Vy Capital and Brookfield also invested. The investor base is heavily Musk-aligned — many of the same funds that back SpaceX and Tesla.

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.