Why VCs Are Betting Robots Will Help Build Your Next Home

If you pass by a construction site today, you’re likely to see humans on the roof, nailing shingles, laying brick or rolling paint.

Time-travel a few years into the future, however, and there’s a pretty good chance robots will be sharing the workload.

That, at least, is the vision startups and their backers are banking on bringing to fruition. Over the past few years, investors have poured hundreds of millions into startups at the intersection of construction and robotics, Crunchbase data shows.

The startup funding comes amid a period of widespread construction labor shortages alongside rising building costs. Against that backdrop, the pitch from startups — that they can save time, money and risk by automating repetitive tasks — seems an easy sell.

If they can deliver, that is.

Monumental, a Dutch startup developing robots for bricklaying and other construction tasks, is the latest to score a round on this promise. The 3-year-old company picked up $25 million last week in a funding round led by European early-stage investors Plural and Hummingbird.

Salar al Khafaji, Monumental’s co-founder and CEO, said investors’ interest was driven largely by the potential for the startup’s technology to reduce reliance on human labor to build homes.

“We’ve heard so many funds say SaaS was the wave of 2010 to 2020, and the opportunity that’s next will be automation of labor,” he said. “We’re seeing labor shortages everywhere in the industrialized world.”

For startups, per al Khafaji, it helps that enabling technologies for labor automation have increased in sophistication and decreased in cost in the past few years. The “autonomy stack” of particular relevance to Monumental, he said, includes computer vision, Meta AI’s SAM segmentation system, new Nvidia chips and high-quality, low-cost sensors.

Early-stage crowd

Much of the funding activity at the intersection of construction and robotics is relatively recent. It also skews to early stage.

To illustrate, we used Crunchbase data to aggregate a list of 17 companies that have raised funding since 2022.

More than three-fourths of the last financings for companies on the list are seed-stage or Series A. Only one, Built Robotics, was Series C or later. Overall, it looks like a startup list with considerable room to scale.