A detail of Michelangelo's 16th century statue of David is seen on display at the Accademia gallery, in Florence, central Italy. Monumental Labs says it is often asked to fabricate busts or life-sized sculptures of family members and replicas of Greek statues for a clientele including wealthy founders and investors. — AP
For attendees at payment processing company Stripe Inc’s annual conference this week, it was impossible to miss: A six-foot Renaissance-style Carrara marble statue of a nude man clutching an expired Stripe test credit card, displayed in an expo hall at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
Naturally, people snapped photos of it during lunch. Memes proliferated. And there were questions, such as whether John or Patrick Collison – Stripe’s co-founder brothers – had posed for the sculpture. (During an onstage question and answer session on Thursday, they said they were not the inspiration.)
In typical Silicon Valley style, the sculpture came from a startup. The creator, Monumental Labs, uses a robotic arm to mill blocks of stone into everything from a client’s dog to the (literally and figuratively) cheeky guy at the conference.
Monumental Labs was founded in 2022 by Micah Springut, a tech entrepreneur and marble-carving hobbyist, in hopes of making it orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to produce stone sculptures with the aid of technology rather than carving them by hand.
It’s one of a handful of companies using a CNC – that’s “computer numerical control” – robot to sculpt marble. The process currently involves programming all the detailed tool moves required to make a given sculpture, which is a time- and human-intensive process the company plans to eventually automate.
The Stripe statue was New York-based Monumental Labs’ first corporate customer, Springut said. It was such a hit in person and on social media, it’s triggered a deluge of interest for the company, prompting “dozens and dozens” of new inquiries, Springut said. “I haven’t even counted them all.”
The sculpture took Monumental Labs 10 days of milling with its robot, plus another two weeks of hand finishing completed by three hand-carving staffers. Springut wouldn’t say how much Stripe paid for the piece, but he did say a life-sized sculpture can cost anywhere between US$32,000 (RM152,752) and hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the type of stone used, the level of complexity of the piece and the desired finish.
He estimated that a similar piece would take two to four years to make by hand and would cost a minimum of US$200,000 (RM954,700) or perhaps millions. “It’s so hard to tell because it really doesn’t happen anymore,” Springut said.
The company closed a financing round of just under US$1mil (RM4.77mil) in November, the CEO said. Investors included Mythos Ventures, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia.
Since its first commission last August – a bust of Abraham Lincoln, modelled on the bronze one by Augustus Saint-Gaudens – Monumental Labs has made dozens of sculptures, Springut said. The company is often asked to fabricate busts or life-sized sculptures of family members and replicas of Greek statues for a clientele including wealthy founders and investors.
So far, Springut said, nobody has commissioned a bust of themselves.
Many of the startup’s clients are artists looking to get a version of their own work in stone: Monumental Labs fabricated a sculpture for Alexander Reben, an artist known for using artificial intelligence tools who is currently OpenAI’s first artist in residence. Reben’s sculpture, based on an image generated by artificial intelligence, looks like a giant marble cluster of ears. The company also made a sculpture that looks like a Hermes Birkin bag at the request of artist Barbara Segal, a sculptor and stone carver herself, known for her stone creations that evoke luxury goods. (Segal did the finishing work herself, Springut said.)
Though Monumental Labs’ robotic carving process currently requires humans to guide it, the company is moving toward automating the work, Springut said, which could mean more sculptures, faster. One of the first steps the company will need to take: building a dataset made up of simulations of the many, many paths a robotic arm might take as it whittles away at a block of marble or limestone.
Currently, the startup offers busts starting at US$6,000 (RM28,641), life-sized figures starting at US$32,000 (RM152,752) and larger-than-life statues from US$95,000 (RM453,482). A sculpture of the family dog, Springut says, runs about US$5,000 (RM23,867) to US$30,000 (RM143,205) – with higher prices for a particularly large or curly-haired canine. – Bloomberg
