Robotics startup Monumental raises $32m backed by Khosla Ventures

Monumental, Amsterdam-based tech company automating construction with robotics and software, has secured a $32m Series B funding round led by Khosla Ventures.

The company was founded in 2021 by Salar al Khafaji (CEO) and Sebastiaan Visser (CTO), former cofounders of Silk (which was acquired by Palantir in 2016), It uses Palantir’s forward-deployed engineering model to create robots and software that physically builds infrastructure, hospitals, schools etc.

Other backers in the latest round include existing investors Plural and Hummingbird. Monumental previously raised $25m in 2024.

The company plans to use the funding to grow their team of hardware and software engineers, scale the number of robots deployed in Europe and expand the robots’ construction range.

Monumental also plans to expand into the US using 100 robots, with which they aim to close a gap of 200k-400k construction workers the US faces every month. This comes in the face of a historic decline in productivity the US construction sector has seen since the 1960s.

“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,” says Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.

Europe’s robotics industry has enjoyed growing investor interest across the last 12 months. In June, the German robotics startup Neura, which is also building humanoids, secured $1.4bn in funding at a reported $7bn valuation.