What Problem is Menlo Solving?

The problem in Humanoid robotics is not building humanoid robots: most well-funded teams can build a pretty good prototype.

The hard, venture-scale problem is making humanoids operationally deployable and economically inevitable:

• across a wide range of use cases,
• by a wide range of users,
• at a price point that makes them a no-brainer economic decision.

Key Bottlenecks

In practice, that means collapsing four bottlenecks that currently prevent humanoids from becoming a reliable labour force:

1. Agent-Style Abstractions Missing

The AI agent boom has spawned millions of developers building high-level autonomy—personality, goals, reasoning, decision-making. Robotics is still stuck in the old paradigm: ROS2, motor controls, low-level implementation details.

• No abstraction layer between “what” the robot should do and “how” its motors move
• ROS2 focuses on motor control, not agent-style autonomy
• Developers building personality, goals, and reasoning have no entry point into robotics
• The explosion of agent development talent can’t flow into embodied systems

This means robotics remains gated to a narrow specialist community while the broader software ecosystem watches from the sidelines.

2. No “PC Standard” for Humanoids

Humanoid robotics lacks a “Windows + PC” equivalent—each vendor ships vertically integrated stacks with proprietary hardware and software. This means:

• No abstraction layer between software and hardware
• No ability to write once and run on any humanoid
• No commoditization, where factories compete on actuator prices and supply chains benefit from volume

The result is vendor lock-in and an ecosystem frozen in high-cost, low-volume infancy.

3. Slow Iteration

Robotics lacks mature simulation infrastructure, making iteration expensive and slow.

• No mature simulation or debugging tools
• Real-world failures are costly—in time, money, and hardware
• Months of work can pass before discovering something doesn’t work, with significant investment already sunk
• Quick prototyping and validation is impossible without mature tooling

The result is a slow-moving, capex-heavy industry that constrains overall market growth.

4. Vertically Integrated, Closed Supply Chain

Today’s humanoids are vertically integrated with permissioned, closed-loop supply chains. No standardization means no competition—actuators, parts, and repair are locked to specific vendors.

• No standardized parts, so actuators and components have no commodity pricing
• Closed supply chains are permissioned, not open or permissionless
• No local repair networks—simple fixes require returning units to the vendor
• Vertically integrated stacks keep prices high and innovation gated

This means the industry remains expensive and fragile, with no competitive supply chain ecosystem momentum driving costs down.

Every well-funded competitor can build a robot. Almost none can deploy them reliably at scale to do economically valuable work. That’s where we focus.