If you walk past a construction site today, you’ll probably see people on the roof, nailing, laying bricks, or rolling paint.
However, if we time travel a few years into the future, there is a pretty good likelihood that robots will share the work.
At least this is the vision of startups and their supporters who hope to see it come true. Over the last few years, investors have pumped a whole lot of hundreds of thousands into start-ups at the intersection of construction and robotics, Crunch Base data shows.
The startup’s financing comes at a time of widespread construction labor shortages and rising construction costs. Against this background, startups’ proposition that they will save time, money and risk by automating repetitive tasks looks like an easy sell.
That is, if they will deliver.
Monumental, a Dutch startup that develops robots for bricklaying and other construction tasks, is the latest to confirm this promise. The company has been operating for 3 years raised $25 million last week in a funding round led by early-stage European investors Plural AND Humming-bird.
Salar al Khafajico-founder and CEO of Monumental, said investor interest is largely due to the startup’s technology’s potential to reduce the reliance on human labor to build homes.
“We have heard many funds say that SaaS was the wave of the 2010s and 2020s and that the next opportunity will be work automation,” he said. “We are seeing labor shortages across the industrialized world.”
According to al Khafaji, startups are helped by the proven fact that over the last few years, technologies supporting work automation have turn into more advanced and cheaper. The “autonomy stack” of particular importance to Monumental, he said, includes computer vision, Meta AI ALONE segmentation system, recent Nvidia chips and high-quality, inexpensive sensors.
Early stage crowd
Much of the financing activity at the intersection of construction and robotics is relatively recent. This also applies to the early stage.
To illustrate this, we used Crunchbase data to aggregate a list of 17 firms that have raised funding since 2022.
More than three-quarters of the recent financing for firms on the list was seed or series A. Just one, Robotics built, was the C series or newer. Overall, this looks like a starter list with loads of scalability
The newest and largest funding recipients
Much of the financing activity is also very recent.
For example, PaintJeta Tennessee startup that focuses on robotic painting for large construction projects raised $10 million in a Series A round in December. The promise of roboticsA Toronto-based artificial intelligence company working on industrial construction robot systems earned $16 million in October.
However, many of the largest construction automation financings occurred a few years ago. This is not surprising on condition that the overall funding for the enterprise was higher at the time.
For example, in 2021-2022 based in Austin, Texas Iconknown for its iconic 3D printed houses, raised almost $400 million in Series B financing. Since then, the principal sponsor of the largest round, Global Tiger Managementcalled back regarding large transactions.
Based in San Francisco Robotics builtwhich recently introduced the autonomous pile driver robot has raised $112 million so far, and the last known round of financing is in 2022. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley-based company Dusty roboticswhich produces a mobile robot to automate the design of construction projects, also raised its last major financing in 2022, namely a $45 million Series B.
Sale of services, not necessarily robots
One of the advantages for construction robotics firms is the ability to scale up without having to sell expensive systems. Since construction projects often rely heavily on subcontractors, startups can offer their services using robotics as an alternative of selling bots.
This is the path, al Khafaji said, that Monumental plans to take in its initial offering of masonry robots. He said builders would hire the startup to do masonry work somewhat than buy and operate its robots. We hope that the company will give you the chance to grow quickly if its prices and work quality are competitive with services not supported by robots.
For those of us watching from the sidelines, especially those looking for a home, it is simple to root for the robots. Although ambitious attempts to redesign the structure have not all the time been successful – in the case of the one-off unicorn Katera which is the most visible warning – the demand for breakthrough technologies is not decreasing.
Construction costs have been rising for several years. If robots can play a role in reducing expenses and alleviating long-term labor shortages, their contribution can be welcome.