Monumental raises $32 million for construction robots

Monumental, an Amsterdam startup building robotics and software for construction sites, has raised a $32 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures. The round matters because construction automation is moving from lab demos into capital-intensive deployment, where the constraint is less software polish than whether robots can work reliably on real projects.

Existing investors Plural and Hummingbird also participated. Monumental did not disclose its valuation, revenue, customer count or current headcount. The financing follows a $25 million raise in 2024.

The company was founded in 2021 by CEO Salar al Khafaji and CTO Sebastiaan Visser, who previously co-founded Silk, a startup acquired by Palantir in 2016. Monumental says it uses Palantir’s forward-deployed engineering approach to build robots and software that can carry out physical construction work for infrastructure, hospitals, schools and other buildings.

That model is a specific operating choice, not just a robotics pitch. It suggests Monumental is sending engineering teams close to customer sites and using deployment feedback to shape the product, rather than selling a finished machine through a standard procurement motion. The company did not disclose how much of its current work is automated on-site, which construction tasks its robots already perform commercially, or how many robots are deployed today.

Where the new capital is going

Monumental plans to use the Series B to hire more hardware and software engineers, increase the number of robots it has working in Europe and broaden the types of construction jobs those robots can perform. Those are expensive goals for a startup: hardware teams need capital for manufacturing, field support and iteration cycles that look different from SaaS hiring plans.

The company also says it plans to enter the US with 100 robots. Monumental is tying that expansion to a claimed monthly shortage of 200,000 to 400,000 construction workers in the US, and to a longer-term productivity decline in the US construction sector since the 1960s. It did not say when the US rollout will begin, where the robots will be used, or which customers will host them.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, framed the investment around housing affordability and construction speed. “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,” Khosla said.

Robotics funding remains active in Europe

Monumental’s round lands during a stronger funding period for European robotics startups. In June, German robotics company Neura, which is also developing humanoid robots, raised $1.4 billion at a reported $7 billion valuation.

Monumental is in a different category from humanoid-focused companies, with a narrower focus on construction automation. That may make its go-to-market more concrete, but the unanswered questions are the usual ones for robotics businesses: utilization, maintenance, safety, unit economics and whether customers will standardize workflows around machines in a fragmented construction market.

This story draws on original reporting from Sifted.