Monumental, the Amsterdam-based tech company automating construction with robotics and software, has announced a $32 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Plural and Hummingbird.
The funding will grow Monumental’s world-class team of hardware and software engineers, scale the number of robots it can deploy across Europe and the UK, deepen its UK presence, expand the range of construction tasks the robots can handle, and fund its expansion into the US.
Britain does not have the people it needs to build. To hit the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes, the Home Builders Federation estimates the country needs at least 20,000 more bricklayers, yet only around 1,990 completed apprenticeships in 2024.
Monumental is closing that gap with a fleet of more than 150 robots already working as an autonomous subcontractor on real job sites.
Salar al Khafaji, co-founder and CEO, Monumental, says: “The world simply does not have enough people to build what it needs, and that shortage will not be solved by another app or another robot doing backflips on stage.
“It takes machines that turn up on site and lay real brick all day, to spec, which is what our fleet already does today.
“Every robot we deploy expands the industry’s capacity to build, bringing a future of beautiful, affordable, bespoke buildings and infrastructure closer to reality. Khosla’s investment lets us put many more of them to work in more countries while expanding beyond bricklaying.”
Monumental’s electric, autonomous robots use advanced sensors, computer vision, and cranes to lay brick and mortar with millimetre precision, operated by its AI platform, Atrium.
Having already built the walls of more than 100 homes across the Netherlands and the UK, along with a school, a community centre, a hotel, and canal walls, Monumental has proved that autonomous construction works.
The pace is accelerating fast, with nearly half of those homes built in the past three months alone, up from just eight the quarter before.
“Construction costs have exploded while the industry itself has barely changed in decades,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.
“That combination has produced the housing crisis: we know how to build, we’ve just made it too expensive and too slow.
“Monumental is solving this by bringing robotics into the physical world, and the proof is already standing: canal walls, houses, a school, 100 structures already built by robots. Beautiful buildings, built at scale, don’t have to cost what they cost today.”
Construction is the one major industry that modern technology has barely touched. Since 1945, manufacturing productivity has risen more than eightfold while construction productivity has gained roughly 10 percent and has fallen since the 1960s.
Buildings go up no faster than they used to, even as the need for them grows. The result in Britain is an acute housing shortage: the Centre for Policy Studies puts the UK’s shortfall at 6.5 million homes, with just 446 homes per 1,000 people, the second-worst in Europe.
Monumental adds the capacity the industry cannot hire, building the homes the country needs while crews move up into safer, higher-skilled roles operating the robots.
Sten Tamkivi, partner at Plural, said: “Since our first investment, Monumental has become one of the most deployed autonomous construction operators in the world, solving a global-scale problem from the heart of Europe.
“That’s not a coincidence – it’s the result of the right team with the right approach to finally close the gaps, not just plaster over them.”
Contractors engage Monumental as a subcontractor and pay for finished wall rather than buying machines, which removes the financial and technical risk of owning and operating equipment. The model is outcome-priced and forward-deployed, so customers pay for the wall that gets built.
Salar al Khafaji and Sebastiaan Visser previously built Silk, acquired by Palantir in 2016, and Monumental was the first company to bring Palantir’s forward-deployed engineering model to robotics, years before the rest of the industry caught on.
Monumental builds across the Netherlands and the UK. It recently deepened its UK presence with a dedicated country manager and a growing on-the-ground team, and is expanding internationally, with its first US pilots planned.
