Announcing our $25 million fundraise

About us

Our mission is to make construction primarily software-defined and work towards a future where beautiful, bespoke buildings are built within a single day with minimal labor.

We are optimists that care deeply about building technology that can be applied to the real, physical world and accelerate our progress to the future.

Monumental was founded in 2021 by Salar and Sebas. Since then, we've built a vertically-integrated product with our own robot hardware, software, and machine vision pipeline, all with a 15-person team.

Our team spans a wide spectrum of expertise (mechanical, electrical, software and machine vision) coming from companies like Palantir, Qualcomm, Dyson, and Shopify. Almost half of our team has been a (co)-founder of a startup before.

We’ve raised $25 million in funding from top-tier investors including Plural, Hummingbird, Northzone, Foundamental, NP-Hard.

We're deploying our product with select pilot customers on real construction sites across the Netherlands today.

Monumental is based at the Overtoom in the city center of Amsterdam. We have a beautiful office in an old school building with a workshop where we're doing in-house prototyping and manufacturing. We're explicitly not planning to build a remote-first company: we enjoy spending time at the office and we need to physically work on the hardware.

What we care about in a team member

We believe speed of iteration is one of the most important levers to get us towards success. This is even more important to focus on in hardware, given that the natural clock speed in a hardware startup is much lower than software. You need to be aggressive and creative when dealing with problems, ruthless in cutting out things that might be elegant but won’t matter, and constantly prioritizing what to focus on. You don't over-optimize on efficiency, but you get the first version out the door to unblock critical issues.

We are building things that haven’t been done before, meaning that even the worlds best experts can’t answer every question we’re dealing with–we must solve our problems on our own. At the same time, we need to internalize all the relevant lessons learned without re-inventing the wheel. You are able to find and absorb whatever knowledge might be necessary to get the job done and have an innate ability to learn.

You are self-directed and can go from zero-to-one on your own, taking a problem and getting a solution from inception to fulfillment with full ownership. You’re constantly unblocking yourself and get excited about showing your team what you’ve built at the end.

You are product-minded and outcome-oriented. We are building autonomous technology for the construction industry. The products we deliver are brick walls and other parts of a building, not our robots or software. You never lose sight of this, and are wary of overengineering some piece of technology that won’t contribute meaningfully to the products and outcomes we care about.

You don’t mind getting your hands dirty. You should take this literally: you will likely be mixing mortar and moving bricks around, whatever your role. We expect you to own an entire problem from start-to-finish, and that includes testing your software or hardware by running the robots and having them build small structures in our office or on a construction site.

You need to be a generalist who is interested in learning about adjacent fields and can think like a systems engineer.

You will enjoy this if you

Enjoy taking technical products from zero to one. You're a natural hacker who learns from building and testing rather than by developing perfect theory. You find fast and pragmatic ways to get things to work. You feel an intrinsic motivation for solving problems that have never been solved before.

Are passionate about bringing physical products to life that integrate hardware and software in systems for real-world problems. You love solving complex engineering problems from scratch and push through till you see the solution work.

Like working in a startup environment navigating uncertainty and complexity. You've worked in a high-pressure environment that launched the first version of a product before.

Believe in the big mission that affordable and beautiful housing is needed to make this world a better place. You believe that great teams make magic happen, while you can solve tricky things yourself.

You are driven, organized, and communicative and you thrive in environments with high ambiguity.

We don't hang out on beanbags and play foosball on Friday afternoons and if that's what you're looking for, Monumental might not be for you. We do offer you a challenging job with a strong mission, a talented team to learn from and an opportunity to build something that has never been successfully built before.

What we offer

A highly autonomous role that fundamentally shapes our product, technology, and culture. You’re not going to be working for months optimizing some tiny component of a large system–we’re still at a stage where everyone is effectively a systems and design engineer for the entire system.

The ability to get involved in a hardware startup building physical products. We’ll help you get up to speed quickly if you’re coming straight from a software-only environment.

Being able to help grow and nurture the team and company for the long term.

A competitive, market-rate salary, with a generous equity package.

A beautiful office based in the city-center of Amsterdam.

We'll make sure all the essentials are in place for you to do your best work.

Our engineering stack and culture today

We fully own our entire stack, from the code we prototype on a microcontroller to final assembly and control of our robots. This vertical integration gives us maximum control to solve the specific problems we need to solve, and instead of making things harder, it allows us to solve each problem at the exact layer where it’s most appropriate.

We bring the mindset of a software startup to hardware and robotics. We prototype rapidly, prioritize the most difficult parts first so that we can derisk them quickly and try to ship improvements of both software and hardware on a weekly basis.

To be able to ship hardware updates on a weekly basis, we make most of our hardware prototypes completely in-house, in our own workshop. Hardware engineers at Monumental don’t spend their entire day behind CAD but are also 3d printing, turning, CNCing or whatever is needed to get their prototypes working.

We treat our robots as a modern, distributed computing system, and not as “industrial” hardware. You won’t find PLCs or a CAN-bus in our stack but Intel NUCs, Nvidia GPUs, RP2040s and ethernet (in fact, we power our electronics with PoE) throughout our stack.

Most of our control software is written in Rust. We believe Rust provides us with a great balance between high level abstractions and efficient low level control and is an ideal language for modern robotics. Rust easily targets multiple platforms, and we use it to both interface with our hardware and drive high level motion planning and simulations

Our 3D sim and digital twin runs in the browser and is written in TypeScript. We compile Rust code from the backend (e.g. for path planning) to WebAssembly and run it in the browser for simulations.

That being said, we try to be pragmatic above all and care more about the product outcomes than engineering for its own sake. So we naturally also use Python for machine learning and perception or embedded C for specific microcontrollers whenever that makes the most sense.

FAQ

How big is the team and what is the composition?

We’re with 15 people today: 2 (technical) founders, 5x hardware engineers, 4x software engineers, 2x workshop and on-site technicians, 1x business development, and 1x operations.

How can I get in touch?

Send us a message at iwanttojoin@monumental.co or apply directly for a specific role.

Where are you based?

In the city center of Amsterdam at the Overtoom, on the ground floor of a beautiful old school building.

Do you provide remote or hybrid work options?

No. We all like to work physically together from the office and we believe it's a necessity given the hardware work we're doing and the pace of iteration. That being said, we're comfortable with the occasional working-from-home days when necessary.

Will you relocate me? Can you sponsor my visa?

Yes, we’re a registered sponsor with the IND for the Highly Skilled Migrant scheme, can sponsor you and can help you relocate to Amsterdam.

Can I work part-time?

Unless specifically noted for part-time contractor roles, we explicitly only hire full-time (meaning 40 hours, 5 days a week) at the moment. We’re not the type of company that asks our team to work 60+ hour weeks, but also believe that there is a minimum level of commitment and intensity required to join an early-stage startup.

Are you funded?

Yes, we're very well-funded by top-tier investors. We're not disclosing details publicly but can share more information during the interview process.

I don't know anything about construction, hardware, or robotics. Is this for me?

Yes, absolutely, as long as you’re excited to learn.. We're looking for people that are smart and willing to learn new things quickly. If you're a great engineer and excited about construction and robotics, this could be the best environment for to dive deep into those topics while approaching them with a fresh perspective.