- Monumental, a startup based in Amsterdam, has secured $32 million in Series B funding led by Khosla Ventures. The company plans to expand its autonomous bricklaying robots throughout Europe, the UK, and, for the first time, the US.
- The UK needs at least 20,000 more bricklayers to meet its housebuilding goals, but only about 1,990 qualified in 2024. Monumental’s fleet of 150 robots is already helping to fill this gap on construction sites.
- Founders Salar al Khafaji and Sebastiaan Visser, who previously built Silk, which Palantir acquired in 2016, say Monumental is the first to use Palantir’s forward-deployed engineering model in robotics.
Britain is short about 20,000 bricklayers, with only 1,990 finishing apprenticeships in 2024. This ongoing shortage slows down construction. Monumental hopes to solve this problem with its business model.
The Amsterdam startup raised $32 million in Series B funding led by Khosla Ventures, with Plural and Hummingbird also investing. This funding will help Monumental expand in Europe and the UK, and launch its first pilot projects in the US.
“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,” says Salar al Khafaji, co-founder and CEO, Monumental.
Since 1945, construction productivity has grown by only about 10%, while manufacturing productivity has increased eightfold. The UK is short about 6.5 million homes, one of the highest gaps in Europe. The global construction robots market is worth $1.4 billion in 2024 and could reach $3.66 billion by 2030, growing at 18% each year.
Palantir’s forward-deployed model, applied to bricks
Monumental was started in 2021 by Al Khafaji and CTO Sebastiaan Visser, who earlier built and sold Silk to Palantir in 2016. Founders say Monumental is the first to use Palantir’s forward-deployed engineering model, which puts technical teams directly with customers instead of just selling software in robotics.
The company is based in Amsterdam and is growing its UK team, led by a country manager.
Monumental uses autonomous electric robots to lay brick and mortar with half-millimetre accuracy, guided by its Atrium software, computer vision, and cranes. Rather than selling robots, Monumental works as a subcontractor.
Contractors pay for finished walls rather than buy, maintain, or staff robots. For example, a housebuilder can hire Monumental to build brick walls just like hiring any other trade, without needing to own or run the equipment.
A crowded, but still nascent, field
This business model puts Monumental in a small but growing group of construction robotics companies.
Australia’s FBR, which makes the Hadrian X bricklaying robot, has used a similar ‘wall as a service’ model since 2018 and recently worked with US homebuilder PulteGroup. FBR is still mostly pre-revenue and is a microcap on the ASX. New York’s Toggle, which automates rebar assembly, has raised about $15 million. CyBe Construction, a Dutch company that prints 3D concrete houses, has delivered homes in Saudi Arabia. Berlin-based All3 raised $25 million in seed funding in early 2026 and automates the whole building process, from design to move-in.
While these competitors usually sell or lease robots or focus on related tasks, Monumental takes on all the labour risk by charging for the finished wall rather than the robot itself. This approach is similar to Built Robotics, which turns excavators into autonomous machines and believes that labour shortages, not technology, are the main problem in construction.
The numbers behind the pitch
Monumental says its fleet of over 150 robots has built walls for more than 100 homes in the Netherlands and the UK. Nearly half of these were finished in the last three months, up from just eight in the previous quarter. The company has also worked on projects for a school, a hotel, a community centre, and canal infrastructure.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, which has previously backed OpenAI, Instacart, Affirm, and DoorDash, said, “construction costs have exploded while the industry itself has barely changed in decades,” calling Monumental’s already-built canal walls, homes and a school proof that robotics can bring costs down at scale.
Sten Tamkivi, partner at Plural, added that Monumental has become “one of the most deployed autonomous construction operators in the world, solving a global-scale problem from the heart of Europe.”
It remains unclear whether robots will be a long-term solution to the housing crisis or just a short-term fix for a shrinking trade. The results will depend on Monumental’s work on job sites and its future funding.
