Israeli advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) company Mobileye Global Inc (Nasdaq: MBLY) founder and CEO Prof. Amnon Shashua announced last night at the CES electronics trade show in Las Vegas that the company is acquiring humanoid robotics company Mentee Robotics, which he himself founded.
Mobileye will pay $900 million including $612 million in cash and the balance in regular Mobileye shares. Mentee has raised over $40 million to date and received a valuation of $162 million at its most recent financing round in March 2025, according to PitchBook.
The biggest winners from the deal will be Shashua himself and cofounder Prof. Shai Shalev-Shwartz, a computer scientist and machine learning researcher and Mentee’s CEO Prof. Lior Wolf as well as Israeli venture capital fund 10D and US funds Ahren, Cisco Ventures. The deal has been approved by Intel, the controlling shareholder in Mobileye.
Shashua did not participate in approving the deal
Shashua will receive $341 million, half in cash and the rest in Mobileye shares, while Prof. Shalev-Shwartz will receive $118 million from the deal before taxes, split equally between cash and shares.
Mobileye has issued several clarifications due to the fact that Shashua serves as both CEO of the acquiring company and a prominent founder of the acquired company. “The acquisition was approved by the Mobileye board of directors following the recommendation of the Strategic Transactions Committee consisting of independent directors and Intel, Mobileye’s largest shareholder. Intel also approved the acquisition as the sole Class B shareholder in Mobileye. Prof. Shashua, who also serves as chairman, co-founder and significant shareholder of Mentee, refrained from consideration and approval of the transaction by the Mobileye board of directors.
“Mentee will operate as an independent unit within Mobileye, utilizing Mobileye’s training infrastructure to accelerate the integration of software and AI hardware capabilities. The transaction is expected to slightly increase Mobileye’s operating expenses in 2026 by a low single-digit percentage.”
Mobileye has $1.7 billion in cash, so even after the transaction it will hold over $1 billion in cash.
Autonomous driving and humanoid robots go hand in hand
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Behind the acquisition is the perception, held by figures such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, that the future lies in physical AI models – and that autonomous driving of vehicles and humanoid robots go hand in hand and constitute the most mature expression of AI in the real world. Last night, Huang presented an autonomous driving model called Alpamayo and a model for operating humanoid robots under the Groot brand.
“The acquisition will create leaders in physical AI in two groundbreaking markets: autonomous driving and humanoid robotics.”
Humanoids are humanoid robots that are usually capable of picking up objects, classifying them, packaging them or assembling products from them. Mentee’s high value, although its robots are still in development, is derived in part from the high value of similar companies. US company Figure AI was valued last May at $39 billion after raising $1.5 billion. German company Neura Robotics raised $1.16 billion just two months ago at a valuation of over $10 billion. The fact that Nvidia is introducing the robotics field and the humanoid market in particular is causing a surge of value in the market and bringing investors and deals to it.
As far as is known, this is also the largest merger deal between an automotive company and humanoid robotics to date, even larger than the acquisition of the US company Boston Dynamics by Korea’s Hyundai in 2021 for $ 880 million.
Mentee’s robots are expected to enter the market in just two years and will deal with the areas that the company has been talking about since its inception: supplying robots to logistics centers and factories.
Goldman Sachs served as financial advisor for the deal, and Mobileye’s lawyers were the firms of Erdinast and Davis Polk and Wardwell. Mentee was represented by law firms Shibolet & Co. and Paul Hastings.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on January 7, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.
