1. What Is Menlo?
Menlo is an Applied R&D lab building the open platform that enables the next billion robots.
Our Mission
Menlo's mission is to solve the robotics data problem through open innovation, rather than through a single company's model.
- Give developers an API: a shared representation space to train interoperable skills and models, targeting 1 million robot skills and models.
- Ship affordable, sophisticated reference hardware that developers can repair and modify as quickly as they iterate on software and AI.
- Grow an ecosystem of 100,000 developers chasing the next billion dollar idea on top of Asimov.
Our Approach
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Open innovation, not vertical integration. Robot intelligence needs internet scale data: millions of real world use cases and failures to generalize from. No single company can generate that alone, so Menlo builds the platform that lets a whole developer ecosystem generate it together.
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Open robot hardware. Asimov is licensed to OEMs and manufacturing partners around the world rather than built and sold only by Menlo. Hardware is a hyperparameter we keep improving in public, absorbing the best ideas from the community with every generation.
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A modern robot OS. Asimov OS lets developers build composable, atomic skills instead of waiting on one opaque end to end model to eventually work.
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Economic infrastructure. The Menlo Store turns those skills into a real marketplace, with digital rights management that protects the investment of the developers who build them.
Why Open Innovation Wins
Betting that one company's model will eventually generalize to everything is a premature, capital intensive bet on a top down approach. So is trying to out execute the market with a single perfect vertically integrated robot, or waiting for enterprises to pay a premium once you've hit near perfect reliability on one use case.
Robotics needs its own version of the shift computing went through: open, modular hardware, a common OS, and an economy that rewards whoever solves the next real problem first, whether that's a solo developer, a research lab, or a Fortune 500 innovation team. That is why Menlo exists, to be the standard that 100,000 developers build on, so the best ideas in robotics can come from anywhere.