Mobileye Acquires Humanoid Startup Mentee Robotics For $900 Million To Build Physical AI Stack

Mobileye is buying Israeli humanoid robotics startup Mentee Robotics for about $900 million, bringing self-driving perception and a general-purpose humanoid pipeline under one roof for the first time.

Mobileye Acquires Humanoid Startup Mentee Robotics For $900 Million To Build Physical AI Stack

Business deal handshake over a polished boardroom table

Mobileye Global has agreed to acquire Israeli humanoid robotics startup Mentee Robotics for approximately $900 million, the autonomous-driving chip leader said. The deal pairs Mobileye's perception and self-driving stack with Mentee's general-purpose humanoid platform and is one of the largest pure-play humanoid acquisitions on record.

Deal Terms

The transaction consists of roughly $612 million in cash and approximately 26.2 million Mobileye Class A shares. Mobileye's board, parent company Intel (its 23% controlling shareholder), and a special committee of independent directors have approved the agreement. Mentee will operate as a standalone unit inside Mobileye after closing.

Why Mobileye Wants A Humanoid

Self-driving and humanoid robotics rely on overlapping primitives: dense perception, world modeling, behavior prediction, and safety verification. Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua, who personally co-founded Mentee in 2022, has argued that autonomous vehicles and humanoids will increasingly draw from the same software stack. The combined company will use Mobileye's EyeQ silicon and SuperVision platform alongside Mentee's whole-body controllers.

Mentee At A Glance

Founded in 2022 in Herzliya, Israel, Mentee has demonstrated a bipedal robot capable of full-body manipulation and walking driven by its proprietary world model. The company has been one of a small number of humanoid teams outside the U.S. and China to demonstrate end-to-end learned policies, rather than scripted motion controllers.

Deployment Roadmap

Initial proof-of-concept deployments at customer sites are planned for late 2026 with autonomous operation from the outset. Series production and broader commercialization are targeted for 2028 — a timeline that lines up with Mobileye's existing eyes-off automotive deployments for OEM customers.

Strategic Read

Mobileye's bid signals that automotive incumbents are no longer content to watch humanoid leaders such as Figure AI and Boston Dynamics from the sidelines. It also adds another big-ticket M&A datapoint to a humanoid market that has seen Locus Robotics buy Nexera, and Kraken acquire Covelya for $615 million in recent weeks.

Related: Hyundai's 25,000 Atlas rollout.

Reporting based on coverage from Mobileye, TechCrunch, Reuters, and AI Insider.

Category: M&A

Tags: humanoid robots autonomous vehicles humanoid AI Physical AI Amazon acquisitions ai robotics

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