A robot called Pisa lays bricks and applies mortar on construction sites — and its maker thinks the timing has never been better. Monumental, founded by Salar al Khafaji, is building a fleet of robots for construction work, starting with bricklaying, under a pitch the company calls “Walls as a Service.”
The market logic is blunt. In the US, the country is short roughly 4.5 million homes, and 92% of contractors report difficulty filling roles, according to the Association of General Contractors. In Western Europe the picture is worse for brick specifically: al Khafaji says bricklayers are the number one job-shortage category in multiple countries, including the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany.
That reframes the usual automation argument. “Construction is a really interesting use case for robots and AI, because it’s one of the few industries where the narrative is really not AI and robots coming in to replace labor,” al Khafaji told The Robot Report. “It’s literally there’s not enough people to do the work. We desperately need this technology.”
Why bricklaying first
Monumental picked bricklaying for two reasons. The first is difficulty: it is demanding, skilled work, and al Khafaji’s bet is that if robots can handle it, the same systems can take on a range of other site tasks. The second is the shortage data above — the jobs nobody can fill are the jobs worth automating first.
The company splits a typical home build into three stages, and sees robotics traction concentrated in the first one. Ground preparation — excavators and earthmovers — is where autonomous construction startups have attracted serious money recently: $270 million for Bedrock Robotics, $200 million for Gravis Robotics, and $115 million for TerraFirma. These are heavy machines built for bulk work, and al Khafaji’s read is that they are powerful but not precise.
Monumental operates in the second stage: building the shell. Brickwork, blockwork, and the walls that make a house a house. That is where the company claims an open lane — shell construction has attracted far fewer robotics competitors than site preparation. The company has not said publicly how many robots are in its fleet or named the projects they are working on, so its traction claims rest on its own reporting for now.
A founder from outside construction
Al Khafaji is not a construction-industry veteran. He previously co-founded Silk, a data visualization platform acquired by Palantir in 2016, and now describes construction as one of the world’s largest and least digitized industries — his argument is that construction becomes tractable once it is software-defined and hardware-enabled.
The framing matters for how these robots get accepted on site. Construction robotics companies that sell into a labor shortage face a very different conversation than those selling into a labor-replacement story. Whether the “we need more workers” framing holds as the robots scale — and as prices for robot-laid walls settle — is one to watch.
We have covered the first stage of this trend before: Waymo veterans are already running driverless excavators on commercial sites, and the scale of the housing gap has drawn predictions of robots helping build entire districts. Monumental’s bet is that the walls stage — not just the dirt stage — is where robots actually get paid.
