Salar al Khafaji sold his last company, Silk, to Palantir in 2016. A week after he left, he knew he was going to build again. Al Khafaji landed on construction—an industry many in tech saw as a graveyard. “Most people told me it’s a really, really bad idea,” he told Fortune.
His Amsterdam-based construction robotics company, Monumental raised a $32 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures, Fortune learned exclusively. The round follows a $25 million round in February 2024 co-led by Plural and Hummingbird. The new capital will fund a U.S. launch this year, scale its European robot fleet, and expand the range of tasks its machines can handle.
Al Khafaji’s nay-sayers weren’t wrong to be skeptical about the construction space. Construction technology has burned through substantial venture capital in the past seven years and investment activity in the space has ultimately declined 33% year-on-year. Katerra—a SoftBank-backed startup that tried to overhaul the entire construction supply chain under one roof—raised over $1 billion and went bankrupt in 2021. Australia’s FBR built a truck-mounted bricklaying robot arm that can lay up to 360 blocks per hour, but at nearly $6 million per machine it requires contractors to make a massive upfront bet on unproven technology. The pattern repeats: bold technology, wrong business model, contractor walks away.
