MenloAI

Full Name

Menlo Research

About

Menlo Research, whose site is at menlo.ai and which is also written MenloAI, is a Singapore-headquartered robotics company founded in 2023 by the husband-and-wife team Daniel Ong and Nicole Zhu, with a global team drawn from computing and engineering and working across Singapore, Vietnam, the United States, Turkey, Germany and Mexico. It keeps three offices: its Singapore base in Sim Lim Square, the city-state's oldest electronics tower; a United States office at 117 University Ave in downtown Palo Alto, a short walk from Stanford; and a Vietnam research and development centre at 68 Nguyen Hue in Ho Chi Minh City. The company says it is currently bootstrapped and employee-owned, with performance-based share option grants covering full-time and part-time team members, and it states on its investors page that it is open to taking on strategic investors who can help it become a global company. Its product is Asimov 1, which it calls the most developer-friendly humanoid and describes as a robot you can build yourself. The story it tells is that it built its own hardware one piece at a time, starting with a set of legs, then a torso, then a whole body, and because the team could not all share one robot it also built a simulator so the robot could be run from anywhere. Asimov 1 is published as an open hardware platform rather than a finished appliance: its mechanical CAD, electrical CAD, bill of materials, circuit schematics and MuJoCo simulation model are public, licensed CERN-OHL-S-2.0 for hardware and GPL-2.0 for software, so a buyer can source every part and build the robot from scratch or buy the Here Be Dragons Edition do-it-yourself kit, which carries a USD 499 deposit and a target price of around USD 15,000 and requires more than 100 hours of assembly. The robot is a bipedal humanoid standing about 1.2 m tall and weighing 35 kg, with 25 actuated degrees of freedom plus two passive toe joints, an RSU revolute-spherical-universal ankle mechanism, up to 120 newton metres of peak torque, and a dual-computer stack pairing a Raspberry Pi 5 for multimedia and networking with a Radxa CM5 for real-time motion control. It is made and serviced through a partner network with assembly and servicing in the United States and Singapore, ships worldwide with duties covered in most countries, and the company states it is already in use in laboratories and workshops. Beyond the hardware, Menlo runs a public research programme and a browser-based Digital Asimov twin that lets a developer run code against the robot without owning one, and it is working on Asimov 2 as a follow-up. The company states that it celebrates useful failures, and partners named on its site include NVIDIA, Hugging Face, Panasonic, MicroAGI, Arm and LiveKit.

Robot Products

Asimov 1

Released 2026

Pilot DeliveryAdd to Compare

Development Timeline