"This is the best thing that has happened to Mobileye in recent years," Mobileye founder and CEO Amnon Shashua told "Globes" this morning on the $900 million acquisition by Mobileye of Mentee Robotics, a company that he founded. "There is a new field here with full technological synergy, cultural fit, and the fact that the company is in our "back yard," makes it easy to integrate into Mobileye."
Last night Shashua announced at the CES conference in Las Vegas the acquisition of the small Israeli robotics company for $900 million, including $612 million in cash and the rest in shares. Shashua will receive $341 million from the deal, half of the amount in cash and the rest in Mobileye shares, and his co-founder, Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, will receive $118 million. Mobileye investors apparently agreed with Shashua, and the stock jumped 11.2% in late trading on Nasdaq.
On the party-in-interest deal in which Shashua serves as CEO and chairman of Mobileye, and the largest shareholder in Mentee, he says: "I was not in the picture. The deal was approved by Mobileye's board of directors without me, and Intel, because everyone understood that there was full synergy here."
Shashua spoke about the background to the deal: "Mobileye has been looking for growth engines for years. In the past, we looked towards security cameras and other directions, but we didn't find anything challenging enough, and suddenly this expansion into physical AI seemed the most natural thing. Mobileye began conducting searches and tests with companies in the field of humanoid robots, and Mentee was found to be the one that suited us the most - a technologically mature company that has designed a vertical robot that had everything - hardware, AI models, and functionality related to what we believe in. It raised several tens of millions of dollars (over $40 million) and has impressive achievements, such as the ability to observe a person and, through a language model, imitate their movements, and most importantly: all of this is in Mobileye's backyard, in physical and cultural proximity."
To be launched in 2028
"In the last three years, the field of humanoid robotics has advanced significantly and rapidly, and there is recognition of the great synergy between it and the autonomous vehicle field, which are currently the most mature areas of AI in the real world, also known as Physical AI.
It seems that you are preparing Mobileye for sale by a company like Nvidia - who are looking for this combination of the two types of assets?
"No, Mobileye is not for sale, on the contrary there is potential here to enter a field in which revenue will reach tens of billions of dollars in the coming years. Ostensibly, the autonomous vehicle sector and robotics are expressed in separate products, but in fact there is synergy between them and overlap. In both there is computer vision, powerful language models that need to understand verbal instruction, need to analyze an image and use computer training to perform tasks. This AI overlap also means that it will be possible to become more efficient."
Mentee’s humanoid robots will only be launched in 2028 for use in logistics warehouses as pickers and packers and as production line workers in industrial plants, while home use is expected to come later. "This is not our first mission. We currently see that it will be possible to sell thousands of such robots to logistics centers, retail centers, assembly and manufacturing plants, and some of them are automotive plants with which we work. Mentee has already signed an agreement with the manufacturing company Aumovio (formerly the automotive division of German company Continental) in whose factories we will integrate robots starting in 2028, and until then we can work together on their development and transfer to production.
"The robots will pack packages, move them and place them in different places while taking them directly to the destination. They will perform human tasks that humans get bored with and there is a limit to how long they can carry on for. A Mentee robot can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with batteries that are charged and replaced one after the other that allow it to do this."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 7, 2026.
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