Mobileye, a Jerusalem-based developer of advanced vision and self-driving technologies, has inked an agreement to acquire fellow Israeli company Mentee Robotics, an AI humanoid robotics startup, in a deal worth $900 million.
Under the terms of the deal, Mobileye will buy Mentee for $612 million in cash and up to about 26.2 million Mobileye shares, and Mentee will operate as an independent unit within Mobileye. Both companies were co-founded by Prof. Amnon Shashua.
In December, Mobileye laid off about 200 employees, or five percent of its global workforce. The layoffs, which were part of streamlining measures across the firm’s divisions, mostly affected its 3,000 employees in Israel. Mobileye has been shutting down some of its units in response to shrinking demand for certain products and declining revenue.
Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Shashua said with the acquisition of Mentee, Mobileye is adding robots as a new growth engine. Mobileye said that Shashua, its CEO, did not take part in the approval of the transaction.
Mobileye became an Intel Corp. company in 2017 after being acquired by the US chipmaker for $15.3 billion, marking the largest exit for an Israeli tech company at the time. In 2025, Intel divested almost $1 billion of its holdings in the Jerusalem-headquartered autonomous driving subsidiary, reducing its stake to about 80%.
Shashua said that Mobileye is an AI company working in physical AI, but only in one aspect of physical AI — autonomous driving.
“The AI that we are mostly using starts in the digital space and ends in the digital space, and the difference with physical AI like autonomous driving is that the AI is in the decision-making in the real world,” said Shashua. “Mobileye wants to expand its scope to all aspects of physical AI because there are a lot of synergies in terms of the technology layers.”
Autonomous driving and humanoid robotics share similar challenges of operating reliably and usefully in a world built by humans for humans, he added.
Shashua explained that the company was called Mentee because it aimed to develop a humanoid “mentored” by a human — a layman or a customer — who shows the robot a new task. The humanoid learns new skills from natural human demonstrations and intent, rather than being remotely operated, he said.
The startup was founded in 2022 by Shashua, who is also the founder of the AI firm AI21 Labs; Prof. Lior Wolf, the CEO, and a former Facebook AI Research director; and Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, a computer scientist and machine learning researcher. To date, the startup has raised about $40 million in funds from Ahren Innovation Capital and other investors, according to PitchBook data.
Mentee’s 1.76-meter (5 feet, 9 inches) tall robot with human-like dexterity and perception can be personalized and adjusted to be a domestic helper that obeys human commands to handle laundry or set and clear a table, and can learn new tasks on the fly through visual imitation. The robot can carry up to 25 kilograms, turn in place, balance, and squat, and is also designed to perform tasks in industrial settings such as warehouses and factories.
“Joining forces with Mobileye gives us access to unparalleled AI infrastructure and commercialization expertise, accelerating our mission to bring scalable, safe, and cost-effective humanoid solutions to market,” said Wolf.
Shashua said that the first commercial deployment of the robots is expected in 2028 at fulfillment centers, including car manufacturers and automotive suppliers, and in 2030 for home use.
“I am very optimistic about humanoids and I believe that in 10 years from now there will be millions of robots,” said Shashua. “There is a labor shortage out there in many fulfillment centers — it’s a very boring task and people get injured.”
“There is also a labor shortage in help and home assistance environments such as elderly home care,” said Shashua. “There is lots of potential if you have a useful robot.”
