Fifteen Arhats received $25 million in financing, aiming to fill the gap of hundreds of thousands of bricklayers

After a few years, you may not have to move bricks anymore.

On February 15, Monumental, a construction robot startup, announced on its official website that it had completed a new round of financing of US$25 million, led by Plural and Hummingbird, with participation from Northzone, Foundamental, NP-Hard Ventures, Material Ventures and well-known angel investors.

It is reported that the funds will be used to expand the number of robots that can be deployed across Europe, strengthen its world-class team of hardware and software engineers, and increase the use scenarios and construction tasks of robots.

Founded in 2021, Monumental produces AGVs that can move freely on the rugged terrain of construction sites. It was founded by Salar al Khafaji (CEO) and Sebastiaan Visser (CTO). Their vision is to use robots to make up for the lack of bricklayers, thereby alleviating the current housing shortage caused by inefficient house construction.

Housing shortage, Europe becomes the main battlefield for companies

According to statistics, more than 57% of European countries are facing a shortage of construction workers. Due to the shortage of affordable housing, about 82 million Europeans will face the risk of homelessness.

Take the UK as an example. It is estimated that 300,000 houses will need to be built by 2025. However, based on the existing labor situation, there will be a shortage of 70,000 bricklayers by then, making it impossible to complete the huge construction plan.

The use of construction robots not only makes up for the shortage of labor, but also increases efficiency by 50%, which is a good solution at present. Some institutions predict that by 2030, the global construction market is expected to reach 110 trillion US dollars. However, the current utilization rate of robots in the construction industry is very low, and construction robots are facing a huge blue ocean market.

Firat, a partner at Hummingbird, an angel investment fund with more than 10 years of experience in technology industry investment, said after this round of financing: "Europe's infrastructure has been plagued by a shortage of skilled workers. We are very happy to support Monumental and its innovative approach to solving this challenge. Monumental's robots will not only improve the efficiency of construction sites, but the technology also has the potential to enhance safety and optimize workflows."

About Monumental

Monumental is a startup company from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with a team of only 15 members, of which 9 are engineers responsible for R&D. They all come from Internet companies such as Qualcomm, Dyson, Palantir and Shopify. More than half of the members have entrepreneurial experience.

According to Monumental, the bricklaying robots produced by the company are equipped with advanced sensors , computer vision and small cranes. Each robot can place bricks and mortar on industrial and residential walls with a level of precision, accuracy and efficiency comparable to human bricklaying.

Construction contractors can hire Monumental as a subcontractor and introduce its robots to autonomously work as bricklayers alongside humans throughout the construction site. Monumental claims that its robots break through some of the technical barriers of existing construction robots, making it easier for humans and machines to work together without incurring additional cost burdens.

Monumental says it fully owns the entire stack, from the prototype code on the microcontroller to the final assembly and control of the robot. This vertical integration gives us the greatest degree of control, enabling R&D to solve each robotics problem at the exact layer that is most appropriate.

According to the introduction, the company introduces the thinking mode of software startups into hardware and robotics, and tries to improve software and hardware every week. In order to be able to release hardware updates every week, most of the hardware prototypes are completely made in our own workshop. At the same time, its robot is a modern distributed computing system, not a traditional "industrial hardware". There will be no PLC and CAN bus on the robot, but Intel NUC, Nvidia GPU, RP2040 and Ethernet can be found in the entire stack.