Palantir alumni raise €27 million for construction robotics startup Monumental

Monumental, an Amsterdam-based company automating construction with robotics and software, today announced a €27 million ($32 million) Series B to grow their engineering team, scale the number of robots deployed, expand the range of construction tasks the robots can handle, and fund its expansion into the US.

The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Plural and Hummingbird.

“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,” says Salar al Khafaji, co-founder and CEO, Monumental.

“It takes machines that turn up on site and lay real brick all day, to spec, which is what our fleet already does today. Every robot we deploy expands the industry’s capacity to build, bringing a future of beautiful, affordable, bespoke buildings and infrastructure closer to reality. Khosla’s investment lets us put many more of them to work in more countries while expanding beyond bricklaying.”

Monumental’s Series B comes amid continued investment in European construction technology and physical-AI companies during 2026.

Similar rounds seen by EU-Startups represents approximately €130 million: around €51 million went to construction-site technology, procurement, workflow software, circular materials, building resilience and serial renovation, while adjacent industrial robotics companies THEKER and Allonic raised a combined €79 million.

The Netherlands also appears through MAECONOMY, which raised €1.5 million to develop infrastructure for auditable and tradable circular building materials.

EU-Startups previously included Monumental in a 2024 overview of European robotics companies, highlighting its autonomous bricklaying systems and focus on construction labour shortages.

“Construction costs have exploded while the industry itself has barely changed in decades,” adds Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “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, 100 structures already built by robots. Beautiful buildings, built at scale, don’t have to cost what they cost today.”

Monumnetal was founded in 2021 by Salar al Khafaji (CEO) and Sebastiaan Visser (CTO), former co-founders of Silk (acquired by Palantir in 2016), and the first team to bring Palantir’s forward-deployed model to robotics,

The company is addressing construction’s productivity challenge by making construction software-defined and autonomous.

According to them, Britain does not have the people it needs to build. To hit the UK Government’s target of 1.5 million new homes, the Home Builders Federation estimates the country needs at least 20,000 more bricklayers, yet only around 1,990 completed apprenticeships in 2024.

Monumental looks to close that gap with a fleet of more than 150 robots already working as an autonomous subcontractor on real job sites.

Monumental’s electric, autonomous robots use advanced sensors, computer vision, and cranes to lay brick and mortar with millimetre precision, operated by its AI platform, Atrium.

Having already built the walls of more than 100 homes across the Netherlands and the UK, along with a school, a community centre, a hotel, and canal walls, Monumental is proving that autonomous construction can work.

The pace is accelerating fast, with nearly half of those homes built in the past three months alone, up from just eight the quarter before.

Sten Tamkivi, partner at Plural says: “Since our first investment, Monumental has become one of the most deployed autonomous construction operators in the world, solving a global-scale problem from the heart of Europe. That’s not a coincidence – it’s the result of the right team with the right approach to finally close the gaps, not just plaster over them.”

Since 1945, manufacturing productivity has risen more than eightfold while construction productivity has gained roughly 10% and has fallen since the 1960s – according to data provided by Monumental.

The result in Britain is a housing shortage: the Centre for Policy Studies puts the UK’s shortfall at 6.5 million homes, with just 446 homes per 1,000 people, the second-worst in Europe.

Monumental aims to add the capacity the industry cannot hire, building the homes the country needs while crews move up into safer, higher-skilled roles operating the robots.

Contractors engage Monumental as a subcontractor and pay for finished wall rather than buying machines, which removes the financial and technical risk of owning and operating equipment.

The model is outcome-priced and forward-deployed, so customers pay for the wall that gets built.

The company recently deepened its UK presence with a dedicated country manager and a growing on-the-ground team, and is expanding internationally, with its first US pilots planned.