Monumental Labs’ Micah Springut: 5 Questions

Micah Springut is no Michelangelo, but as the founder and CEO of Monumental Labs, his proptech company is using artificial intelligence-driven robotics to sculpt the future of stone structures in real estate.

Focusing on craftsmanship and research and development for building stone structures, Springut aims to prefabricate stone elements, while reducing fabrication costs by 50 to 60 percent. Monumental Labs plans to replace reinforced concrete with stone, offering environmental benefits and aesthetic versatility. Initial projects include sculptural works and cladding, but in the near future Springut expects to construct entire buildings using his company’s prefab stone technology.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PropTech Insider: Where are you today and how did Monumental Labs develop?

Micah Springut: I’m in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at our new factory. We’ve got our Mount Vernon, N.Y., place, currently, but we just started the lease on 40,000 square feet in north Greenpoint. That will be our only facility and headquarters, workshop, and fabrication hall starting full production in November.

We started in 2022, and I got our first robot running in July 2023. I started Monumental Labs to create buildings with the craftsmanship that I enjoyed in New York during my childhood walking around the city. I basically wanted to be able to build a new Florence or Rome or Paris or art deco New York. I’m an internet entrepreneur, and I wanted to be an architect when I was growing up, but I wanted to be an architect in an age that didn’t exist anymore. 

So, if you gave me 1910 or 1880 I would have said, “Yes!” I did my internships in architecture, and I used AutoCAD to place HVAC units, and I said that’s not for me, but I still build things.

Monumental Labs’ AI-driven robots create architectural sculptures, but you have ambitions to assemble entire buildings from stone.

This facility is big enough to do multiple buildings a year, doing the beams, columns and lintels that would go into doing a structural stone building. It’s not enough for turning out many buildings a year, but it’s going to be our R&D center. We can’t produce tens of buildings or hundreds of buildings, but we can certainly figure out our first few buildings over the next year or two out of here. It all depends on the size of the building. We won’t be able to build a 50-story tower out of here, but that will come in the next facility.

So we’re going to learn everything we need to know about that business here, and then we’re going to be expanding to places like Indiana, Utah, Texas, California and Arizona, where there’s space and cheap land. We’re going to build multiple fabrication facilities across the country in much cheaper locales, particularly where there’s access to stone. We want to be where the quarries are.

How do you actually build and transport the stone for buildings, while making the process less expensive and more sustainable than concrete?

You start with the elements of a building: the  columns, lintels, etc., that need to be fastened into place. A lot of that is going to be pre-fabricated here in our facility. We then ship a unit to the job site that will be locked into place by workers there, but they’re not going to have to be stacking the stone themselves. They’re not going to have to use mortar. It’s going to be a setup and technology that a lot of construction teams can learn for large-scale buildings. 

It involves tensioned stone. That’s when you run a steel wire through the stone and tension it so you get more compressive strength and reinforced concrete, and get that flexural strength that you’re otherwise lacking in stone. There are folks in Europe who have already pioneered doing this in buildings up to 30 stories tall, and they’re working on potentially even taller ones.

You’re replacing concrete, which is heavy too, and slightly less dense than stone. You probably can use slightly less stone. The process for creating concrete is greenhouse gas-emitting. In the production of stone, you’re not producing stone, you’re pulling it out of the ground. You need electricity to cut it, and you need electricity or gas to move it, but, increasingly, you’re going to use electrified clean vehicles transporting stone to a job site and achieving 93 or 95 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than in a similar reinforced concrete building.

Once you start building with stone will it be for industrial, office, residential or other uses? Where’s the demand coming from?

It can be anything. The primary cost of building in stone is fabrication. It’s hard to cut and shape. Our AI improves the process of shaping and fabricating those pieces of stone. You get a 90 percent reduction in the cost of fabrication, which means potentially a 50 to 60 percent reduction in the cost of the overall stone setup. And, at those prices, you could be coming in cheaper by half or more than concrete.

As for demand, obviously hotels, right? There’s a clear need to build impressive things in residential, too. In Manhattan, developers are already building cladding in stone.

Can AI-powered, pre-fab stone for commercial buildings be competitive or even replace the decades-long predominance of glass and steel buildings? What are the obstacles?

Well, you can put glass on the outside of a stone building, and you will use a tiny bit of steel as your threading rod. But what it’s going to replace is reinforced concrete. You can build a building with the same sort of lattice structure as a reinforced concrete building, but you’ll just be doing it with stone and a little bit of concrete, rather than building all the form works, the rebar, and pouring concrete.

However, right now all building codes are built around concrete or around stacked stone, which are designed to have a 12-foot boulder at the bottom, making it basically too expensive to build it once steel came around. Reinforced stone is actually stronger than reinforced concrete. 

The building codes need to change to reflect what you can do with that material. It doesn’t behave like pure stone or pure concrete. If you really want to make this process big, you have to go through a process of getting those codes approved more widely, by going nationally into cities and states.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.