Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua Talks Humanoid Robots
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, radio, news. Mobileye yesterday had a pretty key announcement. A new deal. A deal to the tune of $900 million, combined in cash, Mobileye shares, to buy Menti Robotics. And the deal is expected to be closing in the first quarter of 2026. We're still in gains, up 3 cents per cent, but we're significantly off of our highs as the market digests what this deal really means. We've got the perfect person to be asking what it means.
What recent acquisition did Mobileye announce?
Amnon Shashua is here with us. Mobileye CEO, it is wonderful to have some time with you, sir.
Wonderful to be with you, Caroline and Ed.
Why is it right for you to go from autonomous driving into the world of robotics?
Mobilize an AI company in the field of autonomous driving, driving assist, the full spectrum of computer vision and AI to control cars. And humanoid robotics has been recognized in the past two or three years as a complementary domain. And Mobileye wants to, it's not only another growth engine, but from a technological point of view, if you are an actor in this area of physical AI, you want to then extend it to the full scope of physical AI. And I believe that robotics, humanoids, they have a great future. Maybe it's a long-term play. It's not a year from now, but I believe it has a significant, exciting future. And for Mobileye, there's synergetic areas in infrastructure, in AI, in software, in AI talents.
So for Mobileye, this is a great move.
I mean, of course, in many ways, people would say you'd think that because you helped found Mentee, your son's work at Mentee. Help me get comfortable with that because many have thrown such accusations Elon Musk's way sometimes in previous acquisitions and not liked it.
Well, it's called a related party transaction. It has been done in the past and will be done in the future. And there are ways to handle it, like being recused from decisions, which I did, and so forth. And, you know, my son has 0.00001%. He's just an employee, so it's not a big deal. You know, he graduated from computer science, and he wanted to do some work. Right. Go work for a company that is very, very strong in AI, working on the future of physical AI, so it makes sense. But that is really immaterial. The material part is the scope of AI. You know, physical AI includes humanoids, includes autonomous driving, and it makes a lot, a lot of sense. Now, Mobileye over the years was always looking for a new growth engine.
For example, take computer vision and apply it maybe to security areas and cameras and so forth. But we never found something that really clicked.
Why is Mobileye expanding from autonomous driving to robotics?
found something that has significant moats, that has a significant term. And humanoids is becoming that click, is becoming this area where you can grow.
You and I have been talking for years about, you know, mobilize existing footprint and then it's go to market in the future. What's the go to market for Mentee?
Well, we see the go to market in two phases. The first phase is structured environments. like warehouses, assembly plants, retail, where the number of tasks are finite, are also understood in advance what are the tasks that the customer is interested. A customer will buy a fleet of robots, not just one robot, and you can customize per customer. That, I think, based on POCs that the mentee has been doing. If you look at the demonstration that I've been showing, like robots picking boxes, moving them from place to place.
You essentially just sell the hardware.
I sell a robot, either sell or lease a robot. We believe that the manufacturing cost in a reasonable volume of tens of thousands of robots would be $20,000. So this gives a lot of flexibility in a business model. So this is phase one. We believe it will start in 2028. Phase two is unstructured environments like home use. That is much more complicated because the tasks are open-ended. You need to continuously learn. So it's not that you can prepare yourself to all the possible tasks in a home use. You need new technology, so it's not the same technology you use for structured environments.
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