More than 150 robots are already laying bricks on real construction sites in the UK and Europe, and the company behind them has just raised $32 million to deploy some of them, in a deal that says as much about the demise of Britain as it does about the rise of virtual AI.
Monumental, an Amsterdam-based construction robotics company, has announced a Series B round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Plural and existing investors including Hummingbird. The money will grow their engineering team, expand their fleet across Europe, deepen their UK presence and fund a US launch this year.
For UK housebuilders and the small firms that supply them, the period is specified. The Home Builders Federation estimates that the country needs at least 20,000 more builders to meet the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes, yet only about 1,990 have completed training by 2024.
Monumental’s answer is not to sell equipment but to act as an independent subcontractor. General contractors hire a company and pay for the finished wall, a cost-effective model that saves builders, many of them SMEs, the financial and technical risk of owning and operating the equipment themselves.
Electric and autonomous robots, using advanced sensors, computer vision and cranes to place bricks and mortar with millimeter precision, all programmed by the company’s AI platform, Atrium. The ship built over 100 house walls across the Netherlands and the UK, as well as a school, community centre, hotel and canal walls. The pace is picking up: nearly half of those homes went up in the past three months alone, up from eight in the previous quarter.
“The world doesn’t have enough people to build what it needs, and that shortage won’t be solved by another app or another robot doing backflips on stage,” said Salar al Khafaji, founder and CEO of Monumental. “It takes machines to come to a site and lay real bricks all day long, to be exact, which our fleet is already doing today. Every robot we deliver expands the power of the construction industry, bringing the future of beautiful, affordable buildings and planned infrastructure closer to reality. Khosla’s investment allows us to put more of them to work in more countries while expanding beyond bricklaying.”
The background is an industry that has never been touched by technology. Since 1945, manufacturing output has increased eightfold while productivity has gained about 10 percent, and has declined since the 1960s. The result is a housing shortage that the Center for Policy Studies puts at 6.5 million homes, with only 446 homes per 1,000 people, the second worst rate in Europe. In the capital, where London built just 7 per cent of the housing it needed last year, the delivery gap still looms large.
“Construction costs have exploded while the industry itself hasn’t changed in decades,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “That combination produced the problem of housing: we know how it was built, we just made it more expensive and slower. Monument solves this by bringing robots into the virtual world, and the evidence is already standing: canal walls, houses, a school, 100 buildings that have been built by robots. Beautiful buildings, built to a high standard, do not have to cost what they call today.”
Founded in 2021 by al Khafaji and CTO Sebastiaan Visser, whose previous company Silk was acquired by Palantir in 2016, Monumental was the first to bring Palantir’s distributed engineering model to robotics. It has recently appointed a dedicated UK country manager and is growing its local team here.
And it’s not a one-off bet. From brick-making to fruit-picking, where Dogtooth raised £14 million this month to help farmers overcome labor shortages, investors are backing robots to do manual labor that Britain can’t get people to do. Monumental says its workers are moving up to safer, more skilled jobs operating these machines. Bricks, it seems, will be laid either way.
