Monumental raises $32 million to bring its bricklaying robots to US sites

Why it matters

Monumental is testing a practical route into construction automation: own the robots, sell completed work and make contractors pay only for the wall. Its US expansion will reveal whether that model scales economically across unfamiliar sites.

Salar al Khafaji (@salar) and Sebastiaan Visser have raised a $32 million Series B for Monumental, giving the Silk co-founders and former Palantir colleagues fresh capital to bring their autonomous bricklaying operation from European construction sites into the United States.

Khosla Ventures led the round, with existing investors Plural and Hummingbird Ventures participating. Monumental did not disclose its valuation. The Amsterdam robotics builder said in its July 15 announcement that the financing will pay for a larger engineering organization, more robots in Europe, additional construction capabilities and a US launch this year.

Monumental says it has raised more than $60 million since its founding in 2021. Its newsroom lists more than 130 employees, more than 100 deployed robots and more than 100 completed structures, although Monumental has not published revenue, margins, robot utilization or project-level cost data. Fortune reported that the active fleet exceeds 150 robots, a higher figure than the 100-plus disclosed on Monumental's website.

A second act after Palantir

Al Khafaji and Visser have already spent one startup cycle together. They co-founded Silk, a data publishing and visualization business that Palantir acquired in 2016, then worked at Palantir before starting Monumental five years later. Al Khafaji had left a theoretical physics master's program at the University of Amsterdam to build Silk, according to his personal biography.

After Palantir, Al Khafaji went looking for a large industry where productivity had stalled. He settled on construction, then narrowed the problem to bricklaying, a repetitive trade that still demands precision and has to be performed on sites where weather, materials and surrounding work change by the hour.

That sequence shaped Monumental's design. Instead of building one enormous machine around an idealized construction site, Al Khafaji and Visser divided the job among compact electric robots. Some machines move bricks and mortar. Placement robots use cranes, cameras and other sensors to build the wall. Human workers prepare sites, oversee deployments and handle work beyond the system's current reach.

Monumental coordinates those machines through Atrium, its construction software platform. Atrium combines architectural plans with a 3D scan of the site, produces a digital twin and translates the design into instructions for each robot. Monumental says its computer vision and control stack can place bricks in real-world coordinates with millimeter-level precision. That figure remains a Monumental claim rather than an independently published performance benchmark.

The founders carried Palantir's forward-deployed approach into the field: engineers work beside customers, gather operational data and modify the product around conditions encountered on actual projects. For construction robotics, that matters because a successful lab demonstration says little about whether a machine can navigate mud, tight doorways, material inconsistencies and scheduling conflicts with other trades.

Sell the wall, keep the robot

The sharper part of Monumental's strategy is commercial. Contractors do not buy its robots. They hire Monumental as a masonry subcontractor and pay for completed work in familiar units, including price per brick or square meter.

"We're selling them a wall," Al Khafaji told Fortune.

That choice keeps the capital cost, maintenance burden and technical risk with Monumental. It also forces the robotics builder to absorb the consequences when machines are idle or a deployment takes longer than expected. Equipment sales can book revenue when a robot ships. Monumental has to make the fleet productive on messy sites to earn its contract value.

Monumental also works with the bricks and mortar specified for each project. Contractors can retain familiar materials and designs, while Monumental avoids tying adoption to approval of a proprietary building system. The UK product page says customers can outsource masonry to Monumental without buying equipment or training their own robot operators.

The model gives Khosla Ventures a clearer path to adoption than a conventional hardware sale. It also creates a demanding operating business with manufacturing, transportation, construction labor, maintenance and software under one roof. The round buys Monumental more capacity to test whether those pieces can produce durable margins.

The US test

Monumental's planned US expansion arrives as contractors face a persistent labor gap. Associated Builders and Contractors estimates that the industry must attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026 to keep labor supply and demand in balance, with retirements accounting for much of that requirement.

Fortune reported that Monumental is targeting Texas, Florida, Virginia and Arizona. Al Khafaji's 18-month goal is a permanently deployed US fleet in the high double digits to low triple digits, spread across at least two states. Monumental's website currently says it is onboarding its first US pilot partners, without identifying customers or confirming that a pilot has begun.

The expansion will test whether the European deployments translate across different building practices, labor arrangements, climates and site economics. Monumental says its robots have helped build walls for more than 100 homes, along with a school, community center, hotel, commercial buildings and Amsterdam canal walls. Nearly half of the homes were completed during the three months before the Series B, according to Fortune.

Those deployment figures show a fleet moving beyond prototypes. They do not establish the economics. Monumental's announcement did not disclose revenue, contract values, uptime, gross margins, customer retention or comparisons with human masonry crews. A 2025 peer-reviewed study of bricklayers and construction robots found that automation can support productivity and reduce physical strain, while site integration, safety and usability continue to impede adoption.

Al Khafaji and Visser have structured Monumental around those adoption barriers. Contractors receive a bid for a wall, while Monumental carries the technology underneath it. The $32 million round now funds the harder phase: proving that a founder-led robotics operation built on European brickwork can become a repeatable US construction business.