Monumental

Construction Tech · Robotics · AI

Funding

Monumental raises $32M to scale bricklaying robots, plans US launch

Charging per finished wall rather than selling hardware, the startup bets construction's labor gap outlasts robotics hype.

• Monumental raised a $32 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures, with existing backers Plural and Hummingbird also participating, to expand its bricklaying robot fleet into the UK and, for the first time, the US.
• The Amsterdam startup builds electric, sensor-guided robots that lay brick and mortar on live construction sites, coordinated by its software platform Atrium.
• Monumental doesn't sell or lease its robots — it acts as an autonomous subcontractor, billing customers only for completed walls and absorbing the cost and risk of running the machines itself.
• The fleet has grown past 150 robots and built the walls of more than 100 homes plus a school, hotel, community centre and canal wall in the Netherlands and UK, with nearly half those homes finished in just the last three months.
• Monumental was founded in 2021 by Salar al Khafaji and Sebastiaan Visser, who previously sold their startup Silk to Palantir in 2016 and apply a similar forward-deployed engineering approach to robotics.
• The bet is that construction's labor shortage — the UK needs 20,000 more bricklayers than it trains and the US faces a monthly gap of 200,000-400,000 workers — is a bigger, more durable market than flashy robot demos.
• The new capital will fund a US launch with roughly 100 robots this year, deepen Monumental's UK operations, and teach its machines construction trades beyond bricklaying.