Monumental raises $32 million for bricklaying robots

Monumental has raised a $32 million Series B to expand its construction robotics service, with Khosla Ventures leading the round and existing backers Plural and Hummingbird participating. The Amsterdam-based company is using the capital to put more bricklaying robots on sites in Europe and the UK, hire hardware and software engineers, and prepare its first pilot projects in the US.

The company did not disclose its valuation, revenue, headcount, or any new customer names tied to the financing. For construction tech investors, the round is a bet that robotics can be sold as a service on active building sites rather than as equipment that contractors must buy, maintain and staff themselves.

Founded by Salar al Khafaji and Sebastiaan Visser, Monumental builds electric robots for bricklaying and pairs them with software it calls Atrium. The company says the system uses sensors, computer vision and cranes to place bricks and mortar with millimetre-level accuracy. Monumental describes the robots as autonomous subcontractors, a framing that matters commercially: contractors pay for finished walls rather than purchasing robots outright.

That model is meant to reduce the adoption burden for builders that may lack robotics expertise, capex budget or staff to operate new machines. It also lets Monumental retain more control over deployment, uptime and performance, which are often the hard parts of taking automation from controlled environments to construction sites.

Monumental says it now operates more than 150 robots across projects in the Netherlands and the UK. The robots have been used in the construction of more than 100 homes, along with a school, a community centre, a hotel and canal walls. Nearly half of those homes were completed in the past three months, according to the company, suggesting a recent increase in commercial deployment, though Monumental did not provide a baseline for revenue or utilization.

Al Khafaji, Monumental’s co-founder and CEO, said the construction sector does not have enough workers to meet demand and needs practical automation rather than experimental systems. “Every robot we deploy expands the industry's capacity to build, bringing a future of beautiful, affordable, bespoke buildings and infrastructure closer to reality,” he said.

The company has also been building out its UK operation, including appointing a dedicated country manager and adding local staff. The UK appears to be a priority market alongside continued European growth, while the US remains at the pilot stage.

The new funding will go toward expanding Monumental’s engineering team, increasing deployments of its robotic fleet across Europe and the UK, strengthening UK operations, adding more construction tasks to the robots’ capabilities, and supporting entry into the US. The company did not specify which additional tasks it plans to automate beyond bricklaying.

This story draws on original reporting from Tech.eu.