Mentee Robotics

Three founders, two of whom already knew each other

Behind Mentee Robotics are three Israeli researchers: Prof. Amnon Shashua, a serial entrepreneur (Mobileye, OrCam, AI21 Labs and others) and founder of Mentee, who served as the company's chairman; Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, who had already worked with Shashua at Mobileye and AI21 Labs; and Prof. Lior Wolf, a senior researcher in computer vision and deep learning at Tel Aviv University, who served as the company's CEO. So the founding team was not three first-time entrepreneurs who met to start a company, but a team part of which had known each other before, in a completely different business and scientific setting.

MenteeBot: a robot that learns from a mentor, not only from programming

Mentee's product, called MenteeBot, is a humanoid robot (shaped like a human body) designed to carry out physical tasks on its own. The main difference from many other approaches in the field is the AI architecture. Instead of relying mainly on a human operating it remotely in real time (teleoperation), the robot is designed to learn how to do a task from a small number of human demonstrations ('mentoring', which inspired the company's name), and then to repeat it and adapt it by itself to new conditions. If this approach succeeds at commercial scale, it should make it much cheaper to bring humanoid robots into new work environments.

The deal: $900 million, in cash and shares

On 6 January 2026, Mobileye and Mentee Robotics signed a binding acquisition agreement worth about $900 million in total: about $612 million in cash, plus up to about 26.2 million Mobileye Class A shares (subject to adjustments). A payment structure that combines cash and shares is common in large acquisitions: it reduces the immediate cash burden on the buyer, and at the same time gives the shareholders of the company being sold a share in the future success (or risk) of the buyer. Prof. Shashua, who was then President and CEO of Mobileye and at the same time chairman and a significant shareholder of Mentee, explicitly stepped out of the Mobileye board vote on the deal, because of the conflict of interest built into his position.

From 'agreed' to 'closed': completing the deal

According to Mobileye's official announcement, the boards of both companies approved the deal and the parties signed a binding agreement, but as of the announcement itself the deal had not yet actually closed. The expected closing given was the first quarter of 2026. In practice the deal closed faster than expected: in early February 2026 it was reported, based on a Mobileye filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, that the acquisition had been completed and the shares issued, and in July 2026 Calcalist described the acquisition as a deal completed in January. The sources give late January or early February as the exact closing date. The difference between 'agreed to acquire' and 'an acquisition that has closed' remains important: in public deals of this size, regulatory approval and the legal transfer of ownership can take months. Here it took a few weeks.

'Mobileye 3.0': from autonomous driving to physical robotics

In the official announcement of the deal, Shashua described it as "a new chapter for robotics and automotive AI, and the beginning of Mobileye 3.0". It is not just a one-off acquisition but a declared expansion of Mobileye's field of activity, from autonomous driving of vehicles to a wider field of 'Physical AI', which also includes humanoid robotics. According to the timeline in the announcement, trial deployments (proof of concept) of the robot are planned during 2026, and series production and full commercialization are planned only for 2028. That timeframe is a reminder that even in a deal worth almost a billion dollars, the distance between 'a robot that works in the lab' and 'a product sold at commercial scale' is still measured in years.