Insight
4 min read
On a typical construction site in the Netherlands, skilled bricklaying has been hard to come by for years. Not because demand is lacking, but because the people who can do it are becoming increasingly scarce. Amsterdam-based Monumental is working on an answer to that problem: robots that build façades and structures on-site, guided by software that plans and executes the construction process layer by layer.
The company was founded in 2021 by Salar al Khafaji and Sebastiaan Visser. Al Khafaji is no stranger to the tech world: he previously founded Silk, a data analytics platform acquired by Palantir, after which he worked at that American data company himself. He also serves as chairman of the supervisory board at De Correspondent. With Monumental, he returned to the world of building something tangible, albeit with software as its backbone.
In January 2024, the company closed a Series A funding round of €25 million. That capital is being deployed to further develop the technology and deploy it on more construction sites.
What sets Monumental apart from earlier attempts at construction robotics is the degree of vertical integration. The company develops hardware, machine vision and software entirely in-house. Thanks to cameras and sensors, the robot knows where it is on the construction site, recognises materials and adapts its actions based on what it sees. The software translates a building design into concrete instructions that the machine executes step by step.
This approach makes the system suitable in principle for custom work. Buildings are rarely identical: every façade has different dimensions, different openings for windows and doors, different materials. Traditional construction automation often fails at precisely that point, because factory-style repetition does not align with the diversity of real-world construction. By making the process software-driven, Monumental claims to offer exactly that flexibility.
The robots have already been deployed on active construction sites, the company states, though public details about specific projects or clients are limited. The fact that the technology works outside the laboratory is a relevant distinction for a young construction-tech company: many competitors never get beyond demonstrations in controlled environments.
The construction sector faces a structural shortage of skilled workers in the Netherlands and beyond. Bricklayers, plasterers and other tradespeople are scarce, and the inflow of new specialists is not keeping pace with the outflow. This makes the business case for automation more concrete than in many other sectors: the issue is not replacing readily available labour, but filling capacity that simply no longer exists.
Monumental explicitly frames its technology in that light. The system is not intended as a replacement for the construction worker as such, but as a supplement to a sector that must do more work with fewer people. Whether that framing holds up in practice depends on how scalable the technology proves to be and which tasks people on the construction site will continue to perform alongside the robot.
The combination of robotics and AI-driven software connects to a broader trend in which physical sectors, from logistics to agriculture, are trying to apply digital intelligence to tasks that were previously almost exclusively done by humans. In construction, this development is lagging behind other sectors, partly due to the complexity of working in uncontrolled outdoor environments.
Monumental is headquartered in Amsterdam and falls under the broader category of proptech, the umbrella term for technology companies focused on real estate and construction. It is a sector that is relatively active in the Netherlands, driven in part by persistent pressure on the housing market and the need for faster, cheaper construction methods.
The market Monumental is targeting is not limited to the Netherlands. Labour shortages in construction are a European and global phenomenon. A system that scales across diverse construction sites could in principle be deployed anywhere that skilled manual labour is scarce and expensive. How quickly that international rollout takes place will depend on the technical maturity of the system and the willingness of construction companies to experiment with robotics on the work floor.
For the Dutch and broader European AI and tech scene, Monumental is an example of a company combining software expertise with a hardware component in a sector that has traditionally had little affinity with technology. The fact that investors were willing to put in €25 million for a construction robotics company in Amsterdam says something about expectations around automation in physical sectors. For other founders looking to apply AI outside the usual software domains, Monumental demonstrates that capital-intensive, hardware-driven applications can also attract funding, provided the application addresses a concrete and demonstrable problem.
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