Salar al Khafaji

Today @IsembardGroup announces our $50m Series A. More factories, more engineers, more countries. If not now, when... 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇩🇪🇫🇷🇺🇦

"That's taken us like a couple of years now to build that trust. And I think we're getting much, much better at it." @sfvisser , @BuildMonumental explains: "You're an outsider. You're doing the very weird trick on a site that is totally not used to it." "If they see an actual wall being developed by a robot or like several robots at the same time in different segments and someone's just standing next to it like this and not interacting at all, that is very magical."

@andreasklinger Insane to read this. Your YouTube has been one of the best things that happened to our recruiting funnel.

🇪🇺 Europe we neee to talk: If you wonder why you dont know about more epic european startups - because they are all there. Mentality. Americans present the future. Europeans barely showcase at all. On my youtube we try to showcase epic stuff behind the scene. We reach out to companies building stuff you wouldnt believe - genuinely potentially generation definining stuff. You won’t hear about them. Or only years later. Why? Mindset. Those are all actual responses (paraphrased) While small and PR is founderled: - “still stealth…” (2years in) - “we havent finalized our PR strategy yet” - “would it be ok to film in 15months once we gear up for the next round” - “we arent ready yet for too much publicity” (wtf does this even mean) - “yes we do in but can you not present it too hyperbole. We still dont know if will lead to ” Once they raised money and got a PR team: - “sorry we cant really facilitate press right now for this ” (still wtf for me) - “sorry the channel is too small. We can only do major news stations.” (Which nobody watches anymore) - “we are doing a demo for investors on this day for 1h with 80 other people… whatabout we do the shoot then” (and not 1h before when not 100 people run through the shot) - “yes we are happy to do a show&tell but the new facility isnt really done yet and the old one not impressive enough so we cant show anything” - “yes we are happy to do the shoot. But we decided we cant shown nor nor talk about details because we want a big PR push in 8months” Context: I am doing a youtube channel where we showcase the best European frontier tech startups. Get them to brag about insane stuff they do. Fix self and external image. And trust me its hard work. We can only shoot half the stuff we want. And its super sad bc the companies are insane. And it’s *never* a good reason why they chicken out. All of the responses above are real cases. Meanwhile the US: “Yo we rented a warehouse in a toxic zone next to an airport… bought a german machine and put a giant ass US flag up… let me now go on 60 shows and talk about how we reinvented the future of ABCD” Anyhow if you want to see my windmill fighting subscribe link in the reply 🇪🇺😬🇪🇺

"People love robotics in general. It's just a fun topic. It's just Legos for Grownups." @sfvisser, breaks down the type of talent him and @salar attract at @BuildMonumental: "One thing that's fun for me is that almost everyone is bought into the mission of fixing the housing crisis. It's a very easy story, right? Very easy mission." "We're really looking for people who understand this through all the layers, who are willing to see a very technical problem and get messy, get dirty, collect data, then back into the office and fix it."

Niall's post: buildmonumental.substack.com/p/i-quit-my-jo…

If you're into hardware, there is probably no team more exciting to join today than Monumental's hardware team. We're hiring Mechanical, Mechatronics, and Electrical Engineers (besides many other roles!) monumental.co/jobs

Niall, one of our first hardware engineers, just wrote an amazing post about his journey, on dropping out of his Masters (highly recommended for many talented people!) and joining @BuildMonumental in the first very months of being founded.

I wrote up how this works in practice, with examples from our production system: buildmonumental.substack.com/p/plans-as-data

On a single construction site, we now have up to 30 AGV platforms operating in parallel, each carrying a custom construction robot.

Once your robotics fleet grows beyond a certain point, coordination quietly turns from a hardware problem into a software problem.

"vibe coding" was coined only 10 months ago btw

Kinda weird that not all houses are built by robots yet huh?

Some of the crazy things you encounter when building at 3am

The 24h build wasn't the only first in this project: we also built our first soldier courses bringing us closer to not just solving labor shortages, but also improving aesthetics in the built environment.

A couple weeks ago, we ran our first 24h non-stop build with our robots at @BuildMonumental (maybe in the world?), running for 36 hours straight to do the brickwork for a transformer substation.

Work really doesn't get more meaningful than this. We're still rapidly growing our team with 15 open roles, including our first UK based (!) one. It's a great time to join: monumental.co/jobs

It's genuinely magical to see hundreds of meters of canal walls, in the oldest parts of town, at Nieuwmarkt and Da Costakade, built by us and knowing that they'll be around for centuries to come.

The fact this works at all is a testament of our incredible computer vision work that automatically compensate for the waves and continuous movement on water. (Internally codenamed "chicken mode".)