We raised $32 million to put more robots to work building the world
18 July 2026
We run a fleet of more than 100 robots laying real brick on job sites across Europe today. Khosla Ventures is leading our Series B so we can build more of them, in more places, expanding into the US
Monumental is on a mission to transform the construction industry with efficient, AI-driven construction robots capable of building walls autonomously.
It’s the first time AI, autonomous tech, and low-cost hardware have been combined in this way to create construction robots capable of working on-site.
The company was founded in 2021 by CEO Salar al Khafaji and CTO Sebastiaan Visser, co-founders of data visualization firm Silk, acquired by Palantir in 2016.
New funding will be used to grow Monumental’s team, scale the number of robots it can deploy, and widen the range of construction work its robots can take on
Salar al Khafaji (CEO) and Sebastiaan Visser (CTO), co-founders of Monumental
Today we’re announcing a $32 million Series B, led by Khosla Ventures with our existing investors Hummingbird, Plural, and others alongside. It’s fuel for the next phase: growing our team of hardware and software engineers, putting many more robots on sites across Europe, launching in the US this year, and widening the range of construction work our robots can take on.
In any given month the US is short between 200,000 and 400,000 construction workers, and home builders will need to add 2.2 million more over the next three years just to keep pace with demand. The homes and infrastructure we need aren’t getting built - not for lack of ambition, but for lack of hands to build them.
Robots that turn up and build
That shortage won’t be solved by another app, or by a robot doing backflips on a stage. It takes robots that show up on site and lay real brick all day, to spec. That’s what our fleet already does. Our electric, autonomous robots use advanced sensors, computer vision, and small cranes to lay brick and mortar to millimeter precision, all driven by our AI software platform, Atrium.
We’re past the question of whether autonomous construction works. Our robots have built the walls of more than 100 homes across the Netherlands and the UK, along with a school, a community center, a hotel, and stretches of canal wall. And the pace is compounding: nearly half of those homes went up in the last three months alone, up from eight the quarter before.
Contractors don’t buy our robots - they hire us. We work as an independent subcontractor and get paid for finished wall, which takes the financial and technical risk of owning and running the robots off the table. The model is outcome-priced and forward-deployed: you pay for the wall that gets built. It’s the playbook Salar and Sebastiaan ran at Silk before Palantir acquired it 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.
Every robot we deploy expands the industry’s capacity to build. Khosla’s investment lets us put many more of them to work, in more countries, and beyond bricklaying.
- Salar al Khafaji, co-founder and CEO
Why it matters
Construction is one of the last major industries barely touched by modern technology. Since 1945, US manufacturing productivity has risen more than eightfold; construction has gained about 10%, and has actually declined since the 1960s. Yet it underpins almost everything and accounts for roughly 13% of global GDP. We add the capacity the industry can’t hire - turning a worker shortage into buildable output, while crews move into safer, higher-skilled roles running the robots.
Construction costs have exploded while the industry itself has barely changed in decades. 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, nearly 100 structures already built by robots. Beautiful buildings, built at scale, don’t have to cost what they cost today.
- Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures
Joining Monumental
Monumental is at a massive inflection point. We’ve de-risked the hard technology that has killed many attempts in this space before, built a business model that works, and now run a fleet of more than 100 robots as an autonomous subcontractor on real sites across Europe - with the US next. It’s not every day that a hard tech startup reaches this juncture, and the hardest engineering and scaling challenges are still ahead of us.
We built a small but exceptional team, driven by a love for innovation, a desire for better, and the ambition to make a dent in a civilization-scale problem.
Join our mission to bring automation to the construction industry, and to create affordable, beautiful, high-quality housing for everyone.
Read the full press release: US · UK.
Logos, images, and background on the company are in the Monumental press kit.
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