(Bloomberg) — For attendees of payment processing company Stripe Inc.’s annual conference this week, it was a can’t-miss event. A 6-foot-tall Renaissance-style Carrara marble statue depicting a naked man clutching an expired striped test credit card was on display. at the Expo Hall at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Naturally, people took pictures of it during lunch. Memes proliferated. And there were questions, including whether Stripe co-founder brothers John and Patrick Collison posed for the sculpture. (During an onstage Q&A on Thursday, they said they were not inspired.)
In typical Silicon Valley style, this sculpture was provided by a start-up company. Developer Monumental Labs uses a robotic arm to smash blocks of stone into everything from a client’s dog to a sassy guy at a conference (both literally and figuratively).
Monumental Labs was founded in 2022 by technology entrepreneur and marble sculpture enthusiast Mika Springett. The aim is to make stone sculptures possible to create with the help of technology an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than carving them by hand. The company is one of the few that uses his CNC (“computer numerically controlled” robots) for marble carving. Currently, this process involves programming all the detailed tool movements needed to create a particular sculpture, a time-consuming and human-intensive process. The company plans to eventually automate it.
Springett said the striped statue was New York-based Monumental Labs’ first corporate customer. It was a huge hit both in person and on social media, sparking a flurry of interest in the company and “dozens” of new inquiries, Springett said. “I never counted everything.”
The sculpture took 10 days to be milled by Monumental Labs’ robots, and an additional two weeks to be hand-finished by three hand carvers. Springett declined to say how much Stripe paid for the piece, but the life-size sculpture could cost as much as $32,000, depending on the type of stone used and the level of complexity of the piece. He said it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Finished as desired.
He estimated that hand-crafting a similar piece would take two to four years and cost at least $200,000 and possibly millions of dollars. “It’s very hard to tell because it doesn’t actually happen anymore,” Springut said.
The company closed a funding round of just under $1 million in November, according to the CEO. Investors include Mythos Ventures, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia.
Since it first commissioned a bust of Abraham Lincoln modeled after a bronze statue of Augustus Saint-Gaudens last August, Monumental Lab has created dozens of sculptures, Springett said. The company is often commissioned to create family busts, life-size sculptures and replicas of Greek statues for clients including wealthy founders and investors.
So far, no one has commissioned a bust of themselves, Springut said.
Many of the startup’s customers are artists who want to get versions of their work in stone. Monumental Labs created the sculpture for Alexander Leben, an artist known for using artificial intelligence tools and currently OpenAI’s first artist-in-residence. Leben’s sculpture is based on images generated by artificial intelligence and looks like a giant chunk of marble ears. The company also commissioned a sculpture resembling the Hermès Birkin bag, commissioned by artist Barbara Segal, a sculptor and stone carver known for her stone work that evokes luxury goods. (Springut said Segal did the finishing work himself.)
Monumental Labs’ robotic engraving process currently requires human guidance, but the company is moving toward automating the process, which could potentially allow it to carve more, faster, Springut said. said. One of the first steps the company should take, he said, is to build a dataset consisting of simulations of the many paths a robotic arm might take when chipping away at a block of marble or limestone.
Currently, the startup offers busts starting at $6,000, life-size figures starting at $32,000, and life-size statues starting at $95,000. Prices for this domestic dog sculpture range from about $5,000 to $30,000, Springett said, and can be even more expensive, especially for larger or curly-haired dogs.
–With assistance from Hannah Miller.
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