Bricklayers have a hard job. Requires skills and experience. It’s hard in your back and knees. Hands too. You should be outdoors in all weathers. Perhaps it is not surprising that there aren’t many young people willing to pursue apprenticeships. The shortage of qualified bricklayers is contributing to the crisis in the true estate market across Europe and slowing down the implementation of large construction projects also within the USA.
Now Monumental, an Amsterdam-based startup founded by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and artificial intelligence experts, has unveiled what it claims is the answer after two and a half years in stealth mode: a recent breed of masonry robots.
The company can be announcing a recent $25 million funding round co-led by Plural, a European early-stage enterprise capital fund led by several successful former startup founders. The other co-lead is VC firm Hummingbird, and Northzone, Fundamental and NP-Hard Ventures also take part in the round. Monumental’s valuation after the financing round was not disclosed.
Monumental robots use artificial intelligence technology pioneered in autonomous cars and a recent generation of low-cost robotic parts to create robots that can work on almost any recent construction site at costs comparable to human bricklayers.
This is an example of an area where robots don’t take people’s jobs. Instead, they fill a gap within the labor market that already exists and is unlikely to be filled in the longer term.
The Netherlands, for example, needs 100,000 recent homes a yr to maintain up with a growing population driven partially by immigration as well as government policies to stimulate home ownership. However, the country has enough construction employees to construct 60,000 recent housing units a yr, and the shortage of bricklayers is especially acute. Meanwhile, within the US, the development industry is battling a labor shortage of over half a million employees, and bricklaying is one of the specialties wherein the shortage is most acute.
Salar al Khafaji, the corporate’s co-founder and CEO, said he became obsessive about applying artificial intelligence to projects within the physical world – such as construction and manufacturing – after he sold his previous startup Silk, which created software to assist people data visualization to data analytics giant Palantir in 2016 for an undisclosed amount.
Construction is a huge industry, generating $14 trillion, or 15% of global GDP in 2022. Al Khafaji said he initially desired to attempt to automate work on large infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail lines and bridges. However, these multi-billion dollar projects, which usually involve large government contracts, involve complex bidding processes that can take months and even years and often require working with a consortium of firms.
So he began fascinated with housing, which was estimated to account for $1 trillion in annual spending in Europe and about $5.3 trillion within the U.S., which was still a huge market opportunity but had much shorter contracting cycles. In conversations with general contractors in Europe, they pointed to the shortage of qualified bricklayers as the explanation for construction delays.
In the UK, for example, the difference between the number of expert bricklayers required to construct a recent house at the extent the present UK government is aiming for and the number actually available is 75,000 people.
Sten Tamkivi, a Plural partner who’s leading the firm’s investment in Monumental, said the startup suits his thesis that the strategy to benefit from the AI boom is to focus on very specific industries where the technology addresses area of interest needs.
Tamkivi, an Estonian who was an early Skype executive and later became a serial entrepreneur, said Monumental also suits into a key idea about changes in robotics. It was once that 80% of robot innovation needed to be in hardware and 20% in software. “Now we’re turning that around,” he said, as software becomes a key differentiator and hardware becomes increasingly commoditized.
Other firms have tried constructing brick-laying robots before, but they have not modified the industry. However, most of these robots were large and expensive machines that required special modifications to the development site to accommodate them. Others can have laid only an unusual type of brick or just one particular brick pattern. Additionally, most previous firms tried to sell physical robots to construction firms, which frequently balked at prices that reached a whole lot of hundreds of dollars for a single machine.
Monumental tried to unravel each of these problems. First, its robots are relatively compact and can deal with the chaotic environments of most construction sites, using autonomous navigation techniques first utilized in autonomous cars and trucks to assist them avoid obstacles and people. The robots have thick rubber wheels that help them traverse bumpy, gravel or sandy terrain.
The company uses a team of three robots to lay bricks. Bricks are collected from the pile and transferred to the bricklaying robot. The next one does the identical with the mortar, which is generally allotted from a large storage silo. They hand them over to a masonry robot, which has two tower cranes that allow it to position the bricks from ground level to the highest of the constructing’s ground floor. For higher floors, the robot rides onto a scissor lift that lifts it upwards. The bricklayer applies the mortar and lays the bricks himself.
However, the method still requires a mason to grout, smooth the mortar, and also install wall anchors to secure the bricks to the remaining of the home’s structure. And although Monumental robots are less expensive than conventional industrial robots, with components costing just $25,000, or one-tenth the worth of competing robots, Monumental doesn’t sell them to construction firms. Instead, it sells brick laying services, charging customers per brick laid, exactly what bricklayers typically charge in Europe, and at a price comparable to that of a bricklayer. It includes a bricklayer who helps supervise the works and perform work that robots cannot do.
“One of the biggest surprises for us was that we thought we would have to be a little cheaper [than human masons]”said al Khafaji. “Turns out no one cares.” This is because most construction contractors charge their clients, the developer, on a cost-plus basis. In fact, some contractors have stated that they might be joyful to pay Monumental a bonus to make sure that the work could be accomplished on time.
While Monumental’s robots lay bricks at concerning the same speed as a human bricklayer, al Khafaji said they will complete work faster by sending swarms of robots to a single task. Due to the shortage of human masons, the contractor often cannot do that with humans.
Monumental’s robots may also lay a wide selection of brick patterns, which implies large housing developments can design homes that look more individual and less formulaic than up to now, Khafaji said. This should mean that contractors who can offer this feature to developers can attract more customers.
Khafaji said Monumental will use the brand new funding to expand its robot fleet (currently only 4 three-person teams operate) and increase its staff, which currently numbers just 15 people.
Credit : fortune.com