Inside a cavernous 1930s-era warehouse on the northern edge of Brooklyn, the ancient and all-but-extinct art of stone carving is having a 21st century rebirth. This is the new headquarters of Monumental Labs, a quirky but audacious startup that is combining the meticulous chisel-and-hammer craft of stone carving with the prowess, speed, and efficiency of robotics and artificial intelligence. Using an $8 million round of venture capital funding, the 2-year-old company is turning this aging warehouse into a modern stonecutting factory capable of quickly producing highly detailed decorative facades, museum-grade marble sculptures, and towering stone monuments. And if founder Micah Springut gets his way, the company will soon be trying its robotic arms at an even grander project: reinventing the way buildings get built. [Photo: Monumental Labs] Walking through the warehouse on a recent day, Springut shows off the 30-foot-high ceilings of the main fabrication floor, where more than a dozen seven-axis robotic carving arms will soon be chipping away at massive blocks of granite, limestone, and marble, turning them into towering sculptures and statues. When the 37,000-square-foot facility comes online in the fall, Monumental Labs will begin fine-tuning its stone carving process to quickly and affordably produce structural stone that can be used to build everything from private homes to multi-level apartment complexes. [Photo: Monumental Labs] It will be a big step up from the space Monumental Labs currently leases outside of New York City. That’s where the company produced its first significant projects, including restorations of decorative stone adorning Carnegie Hall and the Frick Museum, which are mostly cut by robots and then hand-finished by trained stone carvers. It’s a process that can cut delivery times for sculptures and decorative facade treatments from months to weeks. But in its current location, Monumental Labs has only been able to deploy two robots, and its monument carving capacity tops out at 12 feet. [Photo: Monumental Labs] “We can’t do an entire facade, we can’t do an entire building, we can’t do a monumental arch,” Springut says of the existing workshop. Behind him in the new factory, SUV-sized slabs of marble sit idly by, waiting for the robotic arms to be installed and activated. “All of that kind of stuff, large-scale works, both public and private, could be done here now,” he says. The new factory space and capacity is made possible by the $8 million funding round, which was led by Seven Seven Six, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital fund. Founding partner Katelin Holloway, who led the deal with Monumental Labs, says the company offers a perfect blend of technology and humanity. “They’re bringing craftsmanship back to architecture,” she says. “This technology has massive potential to transform how we build cities, bringing back that artistic magic we almost lost.” [Photo: Monumental Labs] Springut says the new space will help the company keep up with growing demand. It’s currently working on several large-scale sculpture projects for private clients, decorative stone facades, and a set of gargoyles that will be added to a new building at an undisclosed university in the South. The big goal, though, is getting into structural stone. These are giant, Lego-like blocks of stone that are precisely cut to form thick and strong building bases and walls. With a lower embodied carbon footprint and a much longer lifespan than concrete, structural stone is seen as an environmentally friendly alternative construction method. It’s also one humans have relied on for millennia. “We basically built with stone for all of history until about 110 years ago when industrialization came and changed what became efficient to build with,” says Springut. “The cost of fabricating stone, cutting it, and shaping it into the form you want became far, far more expensive than doing that with concrete.” Robotics and automation, he says, will dramatically lower that down to as little as 25% of the cost of building with concrete. [Photo: Monumental Labs] The future of structural stone Andrew Lane can’t wait. He’s an attorney and prospective developer based in Austin who has become obsessed with the idea of using structural stone to develop new buildings—partly out of frustration with the aesthetics of modern buildings and partly because stone buildings have such longevity. Standing on his balcony in downtown Austin, he pans his phone’s camera from the Renaissance revival-style Texas Capitol Building to the new glass-and-steel office and residential towers a few blocks south. “America could rise, America could fall, that capitol building ain’t going anywhere. That office building right there, that glass, that’s gone in 70 years, max,” he says. “I just don’t understand why we want to build cities like that.” He’s hoping to change course by building townhouses or apartme