A fleet of more than 150 robots is already laying bricks on real construction sites across the UK and Europe, and the company behind them has just raised $32 million to put more of them to work, in a deal that says as much about Britain’s vanishing trades as it does about the rise of physical AI.

Monumental, the Amsterdam-based construction robotics company, announced the Series B led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Plural and existing investors including Hummingbird. The money will grow its engineering team, scale the fleet across Europe, deepen its UK presence and fund a US launch this year.

For UK housebuilders and the small firms that supply them, the timing is pointed. The Home Builders Federation estimates the country needs at least 20,000 more bricklayers to hit the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes, yet only around 1,990 completed apprenticeships in 2024. It is a gap Business Matters has tracked closely, with a skills crisis already threatening the 1.5 million homes target and 76 per cent of construction firms struggling to hire.

Monumental’s answer is not to sell machines but to work as an autonomous subcontractor. General contractors hire the company and pay for finished wall, an outcome-priced model that spares builders, many of them SMEs, the financial and technical risk of owning and operating the equipment themselves.

The robots are electric and autonomous, using advanced sensors, computer vision and cranes to lay brick and mortar with millimetre precision, all orchestrated by the company’s AI platform, Atrium. The fleet has 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. The pace is accelerating: nearly half of those homes went up in the past three months alone, up from just eight the quarter before.

“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,” said Salar al Khafaji, co-founder and CEO of 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.”

The backdrop is an industry that technology has barely touched. Since 1945, manufacturing productivity has risen more than eightfold while construction productivity has gained roughly 10 per cent, and has fallen since the 1960s. The result is a housing shortage the Centre for Policy Studies puts at 6.5 million homes, with just 446 homes per 1,000 people, the second-worst rate in Europe. In the capital, where London built just 7 per cent of the homes it needed last year, the delivery gap is starker still.

“Construction costs have exploded while the industry itself has barely changed in decades,” said 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.”

Founded in 2021 by al Khafaji and CTO Sebastiaan Visser, whose previous company Silk was acquired by Palantir in 2016, Monumental was the first to bring Palantir’s forward-deployed engineering model to robotics. It has recently appointed a dedicated UK country manager and is growing its on-the-ground team here.

Nor is it an isolated bet. From bricklaying to fruit picking, where Dogtooth raised £14 million this month to help growers beat labour shortages, investors are backing robots to do the physical work Britain cannot find the people for. Monumental says its crews move up into safer, higher-skilled roles operating the machines. The bricks, it seems, will get laid either way.