Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Mobileye yesterday had a pretty key announcement, a new deal, a deal to the tune of $900 million, combining cash and Mobileye shares to buy Mentee Robotics. And the deal is expected to be closing in the first quarter 2026. We're still in gains up three times percent, 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. 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 Dan.
Why is it right for you to go from autonomous driving into the world of robotics?
Well, Mobileye is 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, 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 extend it to the full scope of physical AI. And I believe that robotics, humanoids, they have a great future. Now, maybe it's a long-term play, that's not a year from now, but I believe it has a significant, exciting future. And for Mobileye, there's synergistic 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, 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 decision, which I did, and so forth. My son has a 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 and go work for a company that is very, very strong in AI, working on the future of physical AI. So it makes sense, but you know, 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 of sense. Mobileye over the years was always looking for a new growth engine.
For example, take computer vision and apply it maybe to security areas in cameras and so forth, but we never found something that really clicked. Found something that has significant moats, that has a significant TAM. And humanoids is becoming that click, is becoming this area where you...
You and I have been talking for years about, you know, Mobileye's existing footprint and then its 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. I think based on POCs that 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 would essentially just sell the hardware.
Sell a robot, either sell or lease a robot, right? We believe that the manufacturing cost in 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, right?
You need to continuously learn. So it's not that you can prepare yourself to all the possible tasks in a home use. So you need new technology. So it's not the same technology you use for structured environments. And this is one of the things that I showed in my keynote, a technology that Mentee... and this is why Mentee is called Mentee, from mentoring. The robot is watching, passively watching a human showing a new task, and the video goes up to the cloud. In the cloud, there's a foundation model that takes the video, moves it into a simulator, trains over the simulator. Today it's few hours, in the future few minutes, goes back to the robot, and the robot performs the task.
Let's go back to your core business, Amnon. This week, Nvidia showed us a full-stack solution for autonomous driving. You know, they make arguments that their software and hardware competencies will make them win. Your evaluation of what they're offering against what you plan to do, cost per mile basis, how worried you are.
