Would you pay a robot as a subcontractor?
That’s just what Amsterdam-based tech startup Monumental wants you to do instead of hiring bricklayers.
The company’s electric, autonomous robots use advanced sensors, computer vision and cranes to lay brick and mortar with millimeter precision, operated by its AI software platform, Atrium.
The fleet of robots has already built more than 100 homes, a school, a community center, a hotel and canal walls across the Netherlands and the UK. Now, with a recent $32 million boost in funding led by Khosla Ventures, Monumental says it will grow its team of hardware and software engineers, scale the number of robots it can deploy across Europe, launch the company in the U.S. and expand the range of construction tasks the robots can handle.
“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,” said Salar al Khafaji, Monumental co-founder and CEO. "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."
Powered byContractors can engage Monumental and its fleet of robots as “an autonomous subcontractor” and pay for finished walls rather than buying machines. This removes the financial and technical risk of owning and operating equipment, the company says, creating a model that is outcome-priced and forward-deployed.
Three robots work in tandem to complete the job:
- Pisa: Picks up the bricks, places them on the wall and lays the mortar.
- Petra: Transports and supplies bricks to the Pisa system. Fourteen different bays allow for a variety of colors and sizes of bricks to be selected and used.
- Panama: Transports and supplies additional mortar to the Pisa system. A mixer keeps the mortar and the right consistency.
To watch the robots in action, check out the video from Monumental below.
Monumental was founded in 2021 by Salar al Khafaji and Sebastiaan Visser on the idea that high-quality housing should stay affordable even as skilled labor becomes harder to find. The duo previously built Silk, which was acquired by Palantir in 2016. Monumental is the first company to bring Palantir’s forward-deployed engineering model to robotics.
