This month, Mitsubishi Electric U.S. is opening a new innovation hub in Boston. The goal? Company executives say it will accelerate Mitsubishi Electric’s strategy of transforming from a traditional hardware manufacturer into a service-oriented software solutions provider – a strategy they say will help them compete in the era of artificial intelligence.
The new Serendie Street Boston hub will bring together researchers, startups, student interns, academics and other partners under one roof to collaborate, innovate and develop solutions in several key sectors such as energy, manufacturing, mobility, AI, and infrastructure. Serendie Street Boston has a “sibling” site in Japan, where Mitsubishi Electric is headquartered. The company makes cooling and heating systems, elevators and escalators, semiconductor devices, and satellite technology.
Mitsubishi Electric has had a research and development lab in Cambridge, Mass. for more than three decades. But the new Boston hub adds roughly 8,000 square feet to the existing 35,000-square-foot Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories footprint. Additionally, there will be an increase of technical staff from 80 to approximately 120 employees.
Mitsubishi Electric is generally trying to reinvent itself and move into new business areas…
Anthony Vetro, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories
Anthony Vetro, President and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, noted that hardware is still an important part of the business, and the data it generates can be utilized in Mitsubishi Electric’s AI solutions.
But growth, he expects, will come from entering new businesses. “We are changing from a hardware-oriented company to a more software-driven solutions company. Mitsubishi Electric is generally trying to reinvent itself and move into new business areas that it is not involved in now,” Vetro said.
“What we’re seeing in recent years is that there’s a big need for a lot of software and AI-oriented solutions across all business domains. We had a decision to make: Do we develop that expertise in a very…siloed manner, or do we try to concentrate some resources that could benefit a lot of our business divisions more broadly?” Vetro said.
Zafer Sahinoglu, General Manager and VP of Innovation at Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Center, explained that the mandate for the Serendie Street Boston hub includes:
- Focusing on priority areas such as agricultural technology, food technology, air mobility, and water infrastructure.
- Improving Mitsubishi Electric U.S.’s core businesses to make them more competitive
- Entering new domains such as healthcare.
Sahinoglu added that the company’s research identified several areas of opportunity. One challenge is contract leakage, in which hospitals lose millions of dollars in missed rebates, which create a financial drain on hospital finances. Another area of opportunity is expiring medical inventory, which is costing the US healthcare system billions of dollars annually, Sahinoglu said.
The 120 staff members at the Serendie Street Boston site will be supplemented by a continuous pipeline of 80–100 graduate students collaborating throughout the year. “Serendie” is not an actual street in Boston, but a term that Mitsubishi Electric coined to blend “serendipity” and “digital engineering.”
The facility will house a broad range of equipment including:
- A robotics lab with various types of robots to experiment and validate new algorithms.
- An HVAC lab with equipment for model-based design, simulation, and control experiments.
- A motor lab that studies new designs and collects data for predictive maintenance.
- A computational sensing lab that conducts experiments with optical equipment and other measurement systems.
- An autonomy lab that is equipped with drones, legged roots, and small-scale vehicles for testing of planning and control algorithms.
- Labs with audio and computer vision equipment to conduct experiments on improved perception and reasoning.
- Labs with human-computer interface equipment to conduct experiments on biosensing, virtual reality, and augmented reality.
Among Mitsubishi Electric’s local partners is MassRobotics, a robotics startup incubator. Tom Ryden, Executive Director of MassRobotics, said that the Serendie Street facility will “grow Mitsubishi’s innovation footprint in the region. We look forward to this leading to even more opportunities for us to collaborate.”
As the Serendie Street Boston innovation hub ramps up, Sahinoglu said the company’s decision to open a US hub was sparked by the speedy adoption of AI among organizations — including in recent years, generative AI and agentic AI. “The current AI trend globally created a sense of urgency in Mitsubishi Electric to accelerate the launch of this innovation hub. And if there was no AI, I think we would still launch such an innovation hub, but perhaps at a slower pace,” Sahinoglu said.
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