Mentee Robotics — Israeli AI-first humanoid robots from the Mobileye founders
Mentee Robotics is a Herzliya, Israel-based humanoid robotics company founded by Prof. Amnon Shashua — the founder of Mobileye — together with Prof. Lior Wolf and Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz. Its flagship MenteeBot V3 is a full-size bipedal humanoid robot engineered around an end-to-end AI stack, positioning Mentee among the leading players of the current humanoid robotics and AI boom alongside Figure, 1X, Apptronik, and Tesla Optimus.
- 2022Founded
- Herzliya, ILHeadquarters
- MenteeBot V3Latest flagship (2025)
- $17M Series AFunding raised
- IsraelCountry
- Mobileye companyStatus
About Mentee Robotics
Mentee Robotics Ltd. was founded in 2022 in Herzliya, Israel by three of the most recognized figures in Israeli AI research: Prof. Amnon Shashua — the founder and CEO of Mobileye and chairman of AI21 Labs — Prof. Lior Wolf, a computer-vision researcher and former director at Facebook AI Research who serves as Mentee's CEO, and Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, a Hebrew University machine-learning researcher who is also Mobileye's CTO. The founding thesis is straightforward: the same class of end-to-end learning that made autonomous driving tractable at Mobileye can be brought to a general-purpose humanoid platform.
The company operated in near-stealth for roughly two years before publicly unveiling the original MenteeBot on April 17, 2024. At the time of the reveal, Mentee disclosed approximately $17 million in Series A funding led by Ahren Innovation Capital, with participation from Cisco Investments, 10D, Samsung NEXT Ventures, Hookipa, and angel investor Doron Sagie. The unveiling positioned Mentee as Israel's first serious contender in general-purpose humanoid robotics and one of a small number of teams globally attempting a full-stack, in-house approach — from custom actuators through vision, language, and control models.
Mentee's public trajectory accelerated in 2025 with the launch of MenteeBot V3, a substantially upgraded platform introducing 360-degree fisheye vision, hot-swappable batteries enabling 24/7 operation through battery cycling, redesigned dexterous hands with motor-based tactile sensing, and next-generation in-house actuators. In January 2026, Mobileye announced an agreement to acquire Mentee Robotics for approximately $900 million, with the deal expected to close in the first quarter of 2026 — folding Mentee into Mobileye's broader physical-AI thesis and extending the parent company's automotive-grade perception and safety expertise into humanoid robotics.
The team, roughly 70 employees at the time of the V3 reveal and weighted heavily toward machine-learning, controls, and mechatronics engineers drawn from Mobileye, Hebrew University, and Meta AI, has publicly targeted warehouse and industrial deployments as its first commercial wedge, with a stated ambition of home-use robots later in the decade. That trajectory places Mentee among a globally competitive humanoid cohort — Figure AI, 1X Technologies, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and Tesla Optimus — that emerged during the current AI boom around general-purpose robotics.
Product lineup: MenteeBot and MenteeBot V3
Mentee has iterated on the MenteeBot platform in two publicly disclosed generations since 2024. Both share the same physical envelope — 175 cm tall, 70 kg, 40 degrees of freedom, 25 kg payload, and a 1.5 m/s walking speed — but V3 introduces a significantly more capable perception, battery, and hand subsystem aimed at industrial deployability rather than pure research demonstration.
MenteeBot (2024) — the proof-of-concept
The original MenteeBot, unveiled in April 2024, was Mentee's first ambulatory humanoid: a research-grade platform used to validate the company's end-to-end AI approach, walking gait, and manipulation stack. It stood 175 cm tall, weighed 70 kg, featured 40 degrees of freedom, and used a camera-only vision system with no LiDAR. Onboard AI ran on dual NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin modules, and the robot used gripper-style clamp hands for manipulation. The demo suite included natural-language command following, navigation, scene understanding, object detection and grasping, and simple household tasks such as washing dishes.
MenteeBot V3 (2025) — the industrial production prototype
MenteeBot V3 is the company's most significant product step so far and its first platform positioned for real-world industrial use. It maintains the same 175 cm × 70 kg × 40 DoF envelope but overhauls nearly every major subsystem: five head-mounted cameras plus fisheye side and rear cameras deliver full 360-degree vision; a hot-swappable battery pack enables continuous 24/7 operation by cycling modules while the robot remains active; redesigned hands deliver approximately 30 N of finger pinch force with motor-based tactile sensing; and Mentee's own next-generation actuators deliver roughly three times the power of comparable commercial servo alternatives. Mentee has publicly targeted warehouse deployment by 2028 and home use by 2030.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MenteeBot | 2024 | 1.75 m | 70 kg | 25 kg | ~5 hr fixed | In-house BLDC, 40 DoF | Unveiled April 2024; dual Jetson AGX Orin; gripper hands |
| MenteeBot V3 | 2025 | 1.75 m | 70 kg | 25 kg | 3–4 hr hot-swap, 24/7 via cycling | Next-gen in-house, ~3× power | 360° fisheye vision; 30 N pinch dexterous hands; industrial focus |
Technology stack
Mentee Robotics has publicly positioned itself as an AI-first humanoid company: a full-stack integration of custom mechatronics, in-house perception and mapping, large-language models, and Sim2Real reinforcement learning for locomotion and manipulation. Because the founding team spans Mobileye's automotive-grade perception heritage, Hebrew University's machine-learning group, and prior experience at Meta AI Research, the stack is unusually weighted toward end-to-end learning rather than classical control.
Perception and 3D mapping
MenteeBot uses a multi-camera vision system — expanded to full 360-degree coverage in V3 through five head-mounted cameras and fisheye side and rear modules — with no LiDAR in the base sensor suite. On top of raw vision, Mentee runs neural radiance field (NeRF) algorithms to build a real-time cognitive 3D map of the robot's environment, storing semantic information for object localization, path planning, and long-horizon task execution. In V3, the hands also include motor-based tactile sensing, giving the robot contact-force feedback for delicate manipulation without external strain gauges.
AI and control
Mentee integrates a large language model for natural-language command understanding with a learned control stack trained via Sim2Real reinforcement learning — a technique in which policies are trained inside a physics simulator and then transferred to the real robot. The company has publicly described the ambition as generalization from watching human demonstration: the robot should learn new tasks from a small number of examples rather than being explicitly programmed. This end-to-end learning approach is a direct intellectual descendant of the perception-first thesis that drove Mobileye's autonomous-driving stack.
Actuators, power, and compute
MenteeBot uses in-house electric brushless DC (BLDC) actuators across all 40 degrees of freedom — no hydraulics — with V3's next-generation drives delivering roughly three times the power of comparable commercial alternatives at the same envelope. The base compute stack has been publicly disclosed as dual NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin modules for the original MenteeBot, with V3 upgrading to a redundant, fail-safe onboard AI compute platform. The hot-swappable battery system in V3 allows continuous 24/7 duty cycles by rotating packs while the robot remains active — a critical enabler for warehouse deployment where downtime is expensive.
Power management is a particularly demanding subsystem for a humanoid of this class. Each joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which drives the use of high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) in the motor-driver stages and requires tightly matched precision passives on every gate-drive and current-sense channel. Hot-swappable battery packs add further complexity: each module must integrate cell balancing, thermal management, multi-stage protection ICs, and hot-plug isolation FETs, and the receiving bus must handle live insertion without disturbing the compute or actuator rails. Precision MLCC capacitors and low-drift current-sense resistors populate every rail, and their availability is one of the practical ceilings on how quickly a humanoid team can scale from prototype to serial production.
Applications and commercial deployments
Mentee's stated go-to-market wedge is warehouse and industrial logistics, with a longer-horizon expansion into home-use consumer robots. The company has publicly described a phased rollout:
- Warehousing and logistics (2028 target). MenteeBot V3 has been demonstrated performing case-handling, lifting, pick-and-place, packing, and general material-movement tasks. Mentee has stated a target of serial warehouse deployment by 2028, aligned with the Mobileye acquisition and the parent company's supply-chain footprint.
- Industrial and manufacturing tasks. V3's redesigned hands (30 N pinch force, motor-based tactile sensing) and 25 kg sustained payload are explicitly engineered for factory-floor use, including tool-changer interfaces and integration with industrial fixtures and sensor mounts.
- Household and consumer applications (2030 target). Mentee's original 2024 demonstrations emphasized household chores — dish washing, table service, laundry, and cleaning — and the company has publicly framed home robots as a longer-term commercial horizon, following industrial deployment.
- Mobileye robotics integration. Following the January 2026 acquisition, Mentee's platform is expected to serve as Mobileye's entry point into humanoid robotics, combining Mentee's AI-first humanoid stack with Mobileye's automotive-grade perception, safety, and manufacturing infrastructure.
The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in
A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single MenteeBot-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, high-torque servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, fisheye and time-of-flight camera modules, GPU compute boards such as NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, battery-management ICs and hot-plug isolation FETs for hot-swappable packs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision current-sense resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.
Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.
Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:
Obsolete and end-of-life parts
Legacy semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives that are no longer in mainstream distribution — the parts that keep older platforms running during transitions to newer hardware, and the long-tail items that block a BOM from closing.
Allocated and hard-to-find active parts
High-torque BLDC motor drivers, IMUs and MEMS sensors, SiC/GaN power devices, GPU compute modules, precision resistors, and MLCC capacitors caught in allocation or long-lead times. Send us a BOM or a shortage list — we'll confirm what we can source and at what lead time.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Mentee Robotics?
Mentee Robotics was founded in 2022 by Prof. Amnon Shashua — the founder of Mobileye and chairman of AI21 Labs — together with Prof. Lior Wolf, a former research director at Facebook AI Research who serves as Mentee's CEO, and Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, a Hebrew University machine-learning researcher who is also Mobileye's CTO. The company is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel.
What is MenteeBot V3?
MenteeBot V3 is Mentee Robotics' 2025 flagship humanoid robot. It stands 175 cm tall, weighs 70 kg, carries up to 25 kg, and has 40 degrees of freedom. V3 adds 360-degree fisheye vision, redesigned dexterous hands with 30 N pinch force and motor-based tactile sensing, and hot-swappable batteries that allow 24/7 operation through battery cycling. Mentee has publicly targeted warehouse deployment by 2028 and home use by 2030.
Where are MenteeBot robots deployed commercially?
Mentee has not publicly named a marquee first customer of the scale of Figure AI's BMW pilot, but has stated warehouse and logistics as its initial commercial wedge with rollout targeted for 2028. Demonstrations to date have covered case-handling, lifting, pick-and-place, packing, table service, and dish washing. Following the January 2026 Mobileye acquisition, deployments are expected to leverage Mobileye's automotive-grade manufacturing and safety infrastructure.
How much has Mentee Robotics raised, and was it acquired?
Mentee disclosed approximately $17 million in Series A funding at its public unveiling in April 2024, with investors including Ahren Innovation Capital (lead), Cisco Investments, Hookipa, 10D, Samsung NEXT Ventures, and angel investor Doron Sagie. In January 2026, Mobileye announced an agreement to acquire Mentee Robotics for approximately $900 million, expected to close in the first quarter of 2026 — making it one of the largest humanoid-robotics acquisitions to date.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Mentee Robotics?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Mentee Robotics. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hybrid supports robotics developers by sourcing obsolete, allocated, and hard-to-find semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives for R&D, prototype, and low-volume production builds.
Can Hybrid help with components for humanoid robotics builds?
Yes. We regularly support R&D and integrator teams with hard-to-find semiconductors, BLDC motor-driver ICs, IMUs and other MEMS sensors, connectors, SiC/GaN power devices, and precision passives for the industrial and embedded boards used in robotics platforms. Send us a BOM or a short list of shortages and we'll confirm availability and pricing.
Trademark and affiliation notice. Mentee Robotics®, MenteeBot, and MenteeBot V3 are trademarks of Mentee Robotics Ltd. Mobileye® is a trademark of Mobileye Global Inc. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Mentee Robotics Ltd. or Mobileye Global Inc. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.