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Mind Robotics is an American industrial robotics company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It is building what it calls a "full-stack platform of foundation models, purpose-built robotics, and deployment infrastructure to automate industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale," aimed at dexterous, variable factory work that conventional industrial robots handle poorly.[1][2] Formed in November 2025, the company was founded by RJ Scaringe, the founder and chief executive of the electric vehicle maker Rivian, who chairs its board.[3][1][4] Rivian is a shareholder and Mind's first customer. It gives the company a live, high-volume vehicle plant in Normal, Illinois, for collecting training data and for deploying robots.[5][6][7]

Mind raised a $115 million seed round led by Eclipse when it was formed,[1] a $500 million Series A co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz in March 2026, and a $400 million round led by Kleiner Perkins in May 2026, taking total investment above $1 billion.[2] Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported that the Series A valued the company at $2 billion and the May round at $3.4 billion; the company's own announcements did not state a valuation.[8][9][1][2] In October 2026 Mind hired Doug Field, a former executive at Tesla, Apple and Ford, as president.[5] As of October 2026 it had not shown its robots publicly.[10]

Overview

FieldDetail
Legal entitiesMind Robotics, Inc. and its subsidiary Mind Robotics, LLC, both Delaware companies[11][12]
FormedNovember 2025[3]
Founder and chairmanRJ Scaringe[2][4]
PresidentDoug Field (from October 2026)[5]
HeadquartersPalo Alto, California[1][13]
FocusAI models, robot hardware and deployment infrastructure for manufacturing work[1]
First customer and launch partnerRivian[5][6]
Total fundingMore than $1 billion (company figure, May 2026)[2]
Reported valuation$3.4 billion (Reuters, citing a source familiar with the matter, May 2026)[9]
Rivian's ownership32.1% on a shares-outstanding basis as of June 30, 2026[14]
Public productsNone shown as of October 2026[10]
Websitemindrobotics.com[13]

Expanded article table

History

Origins as "Project Synapse"

Scaringe told TechCrunch in March 2026 that the company grew out of Rivian's planning for future factories. About two years before that interview, he said, growing confidence in the R2 vehicle led Rivian to expect it would need to build "four or five plants over the next decade," and he "kicked off an effort to study the future of manufacturing." He concluded that classic industrial robots would stay in use, but that "robotics with human-like skills" would become important.[15] He said he then met "essentially every company" working on robots with human-like skills and decided that none had all the ingredients he wanted. He did not want Rivian's future manufacturing to depend on companies that had never industrialized a product or spent time understanding industrial operations, or that lacked a data flywheel for training models or supply chains. "I felt I could build a better company," he said.[15]

The internal code name was "Project Synapse." Scaringe said the name Mind was chosen because it links to synapses and the brain, and that his children's school, which was called Synapse, was part of the inspiration. He almost called the company Synapse but wanted something simpler.[15]

Descriptions of how the company relates to Rivian differ in emphasis. Scaringe described Mind as "a whole new company" in which "Rivian's like a partner," and TechCrunch wrote that it "was not born within the walls of Rivian."[15] Rivian's own filings say that Rivian established Mind Robotics, Inc. and Mind Robotics, LLC in November 2025 and received Series Seed preferred shares in exchange for cash and a license to intellectual property developed for use in industrial automation, with a combined fair value of about $128 million.[3][16] Rivian's investor materials refer to Mind as one of its "spin out companies."[17]

Formation and seed round (November 2025)

Rivian disclosed the company in its third-quarter 2025 shareholder letter on November 4, 2025. The letter said Rivian had set up Mind Robotics that month and "secured approximately $110 million of external seed capital," and that Mind would "focus on the advancement of industrial AI to reshape how physical world businesses operate and leverage Rivian operations data as the foundation for a robotics data flywheel."[18] On the investor call that day, Scaringe said Rivian wanted "direct control and direct influence over the design and development of advanced AI robotics that would be very focused on industrial applications."[19]

TechCrunch reported that the seed round was $115 million and was led by Eclipse, whose partner Jiten Behl, a former Rivian employee, disclosed the investment on LinkedIn. At the time the company had almost no public presence beyond a broadly worded trademark application.[19] Mind's later announcements also give the seed as $115 million. Rivian's 10-K states that third-party investors, primarily Eclipse Ventures, paid about $112 million for Series Seed preferred shares, which left Rivian with a 53.5% equity interest. Rivian classified Mind as a variable interest entity of which it was the primary beneficiary and therefore consolidated it in its financial statements; at December 31, 2025, Mind's assets were about $115 million, consisting of cash and cash equivalents.[1][3]

Series A (March 2026)

On March 11, 2026, Mind announced a $500 million Series A round co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, expected to close later that month. Accel partner Sameer Gandhi joined its board.[1][15] The Wall Street Journal first reported the round, and TechCrunch, citing the Journal, said it valued Mind at around $2 billion; Reuters reported the same figure from a person close to the deal and called it one of the largest Series A rounds for a robotics company.[20][8] The round came a day after another robotics startup, Rhoda AI, emerged from stealth with $450 million.[21]

In the announcement Scaringe said, "We're building robots that will perform real tasks, in real plants, at real scale." Sarah Wang, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, called him "one of the very few founders who have built and scaled a vertically integrated hardware company."[1] According to TechCrunch, Scaringe told the Journal that Mind would have a large number of robots deployed by the end of 2026.[20]

Rivian's first-quarter 2026 10-Q says that by the time of the Series A, Mind had "established an independent management team, product plan, and standalone operating roadmap," and that its board grew from four to five seats with a director appointed on behalf of a Series A investor. Rivian concluded that Mind was no longer a variable interest entity and deconsolidated it in March 2026. It remeasured its retained stake at about $569 million using the Series A share price and booked a $506 million gain. Its stake was 37.6% on a shares-outstanding basis at March 31, 2026.[16]

Series A-1 (May 2026)

On May 13, 2026, Mind announced a $400 million financing led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing total investment above $1 billion. New investors included Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, Incharge Capital, A-Star Capital and Garuda Ventures. Existing investors Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Prysm Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Greenoaks also took part.[2] Rivian's quarterly report for the second quarter calls the new securities Series A-1 shares.[14] TechCrunch reported that the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce also invested.[22]

Reuters, citing a source familiar with the matter, reported that the round valued Mind at $3.4 billion, up from $2 billion in March. TechCrunch, citing the Wall Street Journal, put the valuation at more than $3 billion.[9][22] Kleiner partner Ilya Fushman said Mind "has unique access to all the ingredients required to make general-purpose robotics work in real-world manufacturing."[2] Kleiner's own note on the investment pointed to Rivian's role as "a key partner and shareholder" giving Mind access to a live, high-volume manufacturing environment.[23] The new shares diluted Rivian's stake to 32.1% by June 30, 2026.[14]

Doug Field becomes president (October 2026)

On October 13, 2026, Mind named Doug Field president. Working with Scaringe, Field oversees "all aspects of the business, including product, engineering, and operations."[5] The appointment was announced onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco.[6] Field had been Ford's chief EV, digital and design officer until April 2026. Before that he led Apple's Special Projects Group and its Mac hardware engineering, and he was senior vice president of engineering at Tesla, where he oversaw development of the Model 3.[5][6] TechCrunch noted that he was also the first employee at Segway.[6] Field said Mind's advantage was "the ability to deploy and learn inside a real, high-volume factory from day one."[5]

Technology and approach

Target tasks

Mind describes its goal as "universally capable robots to transform industrial work," starting on the factory floor with automotive manufacturing.[13] Its Series A announcement framed the opportunity as a "structural gap": existing industrial robots can perform "repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks," but much factory work "requires human-like dexterity, adaptation, and physical reasoning that classical robotics cannot address."[1] The company's website lists four kinds of work it is targeting:[13]

TaskCompany description
Pick and placeLocating, grasping and placing objects that vary in angle, occlusion and orientation
SortingTelling visually similar items apart and routing each one correctly at line speed
FasteningJoining parts that do not always align, adjusting force and sequence, and recovering from failures
ConnectorsAchieving "a secure, verified fit despite flexible harnesses, part variation, and tight tolerances"

Expanded article table

Data from Rivian's plant

The company says it is "collecting video data at industrial scale," capturing work as it happens on Rivian's active vehicle lines. Its data pipeline is "centered on learning from skilled operators as they perform highly dexterous tasks," and it says its foundation models learn "spatial reasoning, object dynamics, and tool manipulation" from real production hours.[13] The website says that "our first robots are learning on the job," with Rivian as its first manufacturing partner.[13] Tech Funding News reported in May 2026 that Mind's first robots were already operating inside Rivian's plants.[24]

Mind's job listings give more detail about this setup. A field technician listing describes a data collection operation at Rivian's plant in Normal that relies on camera-based data capture stations and docking stations across the factory floor.[7] A mechanical engineering listing describes a "wearable data collection platform" with head-worn and body-worn devices.[25] Another covers tactile sensing "skins" for robot fingertips, palms and grippers, and for data collection gloves.[26]

Models and compute

A research listing asks for experience building large-scale training pipelines for multimodal and vision-language-action (VLA) systems and owning the full loop from data to training, evaluation and deployment on real robots.[27] An infrastructure listing calls for distributed training "across hundreds of GPUs."[28] Public information about Mind's models comes from its website, announcements and job listings. Its approach falls within the wider effort to build robot foundation models for physical AI, with automotive manufacturing as its starting domain.[13][1]

At a Rivian event in December 2025, after Rivian announced its own autonomy chip, Scaringe told TechCrunch that "it doesn't take a lot of imagination" to think that Rivian might sell those chips to Mind. "It's a robotics processor, so it could work really well for that," he said.[20]

Robot design

Scaringe has said that Mind's robots will not try to mimic all of human biomechanics.[6] He told the Wall Street Journal that "doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing."[20] In the March 2026 TechCrunch interview, he argued that in industrial work "the work happens with the hands," so the rest of the robot exists "to get the hands to the right place." He said many humanoid systems designed for manufacturing "are way too complex relative to what they do," and that designing for motions such as backflips adds unnecessary complexity, when deployment at scale calls for fewer failure modes and lower power consumption.[15]

He said Mind's robots would be "human-like" in that they would have hands, a perception model "at the top," the ability to adjust in X, Y and Z, and locomotion, but that mimicking human biomechanics "misses some of the fundamental points of manufacturing." He also argued that no single set of hands suits every industrial task, contrasting gripping a four-inch steel pipe with threading an M4 fastener into an aluminum casting. Factories, he said, are easier settings than homes: they have no stairs or carpet-to-tile transitions and can be mapped. He said the robots should feel "friendly" because they will work alongside people for long periods, but not "dopey."[15] Mind had not shown its hardware by October 2026, and Electrek noted that it had not said whether any of it is humanoid.[10]

Funding

RoundAnnouncedAmountLead investor(s)Other named participantsReported valuation
Seed (Series Seed preferred)November 2025$115 million (company figure); Rivian's 10-K gives about $112 million from third parties[1][3]Eclipse[19]Rivian (cash and an intellectual property license)[3]Not disclosed
Series A (Series A preferred)March 11, 2026$500 million[1]Accel, Andreessen Horowitz[1]Not itemizedAbout $2 billion (Wall Street Journal via TechCrunch; Reuters source)[20][8]
Series A-1May 13, 2026$400 million[2]Kleiner Perkins[2]New: Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, Incharge Capital, A-Star Capital, Garuda Ventures. Existing: Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Prysm Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Greenoaks[2]. Also the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce, per TechCrunch[22]$3.4 billion (Reuters source); "more than $3 billion" (Wall Street Journal via TechCrunch)[9][22]

Expanded article table

The company said in May 2026 that its total funding was more than $1 billion.[2] Neither Mind nor the outlets cited above stated whether the reported valuations were pre-money or post-money.

Relationship with Rivian

Rivian is a major shareholder in Mind and its launch customer, and Mind's data collection takes place in Rivian's plant.[1][7] Mind's announcements describe Rivian as "a key customer and launch partner, providing a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment."[5] Rivian's share has fallen as outside investors have bought in:

DateRivian's interestBasis and accounting
After the seed round (late 2025)53.5%Equity interest; Mind consolidated as a variable interest entity[3]
March 31, 202637.6%Shares-outstanding basis; deconsolidated after the Series A and accounted for under the equity method[16]
June 30, 202632.1%Shares-outstanding basis, after the Series A-1 issuance[14]

Expanded article table

Rivian's filings list overlapping roles. Scaringe chairs the boards of Mind Robotics, Inc. and Mind Robotics, LLC, and Rivian's chief administrative officer, Michael Callahan, sits on Mind's board.[3][4] Rivian's 10-K warns that Scaringe's positions at Mind and at Also, Inc. "may give rise to fiduciary or other duties in conflict with the duties he owes to us" and may compete for his time.[3] According to Rivian's 10-K, Mind's board had four seats at the end of 2025: Eclipse and Rivian each appointed one director, and Scaringe held a seat that common unit holders and he had the right to fill.[3] In March 2026 Scaringe named the board as himself, Jiten Behl of Eclipse, Sameer Gandhi of Accel and a Rivian representative.[15]

Scaringe holds his own stake in Mind. On November 6, 2025, Mind Robotics, LLC issued him 1,000,000 common units as a profits interest for his service as chair, approved in advance by a special committee of independent Rivian directors. The award gives him up to a 10% economic interest in Mind Robotics once its profits and gains exceed a set threshold, and it was fully vested when issued.[11] Rivian's 2026 proxy statement gave the award's fair value at grant as $14.5 million. It also disclosed that in March 2026 Mind Robotics, Inc. granted Scaringe an option on 200,000 common shares, in two tranches that vest on financial or operational milestones.[4]

TechCrunch describes Mind as the second company Scaringe has created outside Rivian, after the micromobility company Also, Inc. Both operate as standalone companies in which Rivian holds a minority stake; Scaringe chairs both, while other executives run them day to day.[6][4]

Leadership

PersonRole at MindBackground
RJ ScaringeFounder; chairman of the board[2][4]Founded Rivian in June 2009 and is its chief executive; B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Sloan Automotive Laboratory at MIT[4]
Doug FieldPresident (from October 2026)[5]Ford chief EV, digital and design officer; led Apple's Special Projects Group; Tesla senior vice president of engineering[5]
Jiten BehlDirector[15]Partner at Eclipse and a former Rivian employee[19]
Sameer GandhiDirector (from the Series A)[1]Partner at Accel[1]
Michael CallahanDirector[4]Rivian chief administrative officer and chief legal officer; former general counsel of LinkedIn[4]

Expanded article table

Before Field's arrival, an August 2026 TechCrunch event preview described Scaringe as running Mind "as executive chair and acting CEO."[29] Mind has not disclosed its headcount. On October 27, 2026, its public job board listed 33 open positions, 30 in Palo Alto and three in Normal, Illinois, spanning software engineering, hardware engineering, operations, data and administration.[30]

Reception

Investors cited Scaringe's manufacturing record. Accel's Gandhi said the team "helped build one of the most ambitious manufacturing operations in the EV industry," and Kleiner's Fushman called robotics "the ultimate frontier."[1][2] Reuters noted that industry experts and executives have warned that commercializing advanced robots remains a long road, partly because training the underlying models requires large amounts of hard-to-gather data.[8] Tech Funding News listed Figure AI and Skild AI among Mind's competitors.[24]

Writing about Field's hire, Electrek's Fred Lambert pointed out that Mind had raised about $1 billion without showing a product publicly. He argued that foundation models "are the easy part to fundraise on" and that making robot hardware reliable enough to run shifts in a car plant is where companies, Tesla included, have struggled. He called Field's record since Tesla mixed, citing the cancellation of Apple's car project and losses at Ford's EV unit, while crediting Field's team with Ford's low-cost Universal EV Platform.[10]

Press descriptions of Mind's hardware have varied. TechCrunch's August 2026 Disrupt preview called it "a humanoid robotics company,"[29] while Scaringe has said the robots will not mimic human biomechanics.[15][6] Debarghya Das's "Ultimate Neolab List" includes Mind Robotics but rates it "Borderline," with the note: "Huge early raise, but an operator-led corporate spinout building hardware and deployments, not a researcher lab."[31]

See also

References

  1. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13 ^14 ^15 ^16 ^17 ^18Mind Robotics (press release via Business Wire), Mind Robotics Announces $500M Financing to Support Deployment of AI-Powered Robots at Industrial Scale, March 11, 2026.
  2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13Mind Robotics (press release via Business Wire), Mind Robotics Announces $400M in New Funding to Expand Industrial Robotics Deployment, May 13, 2026.
  3. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10Rivian Automotive, Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, filed February 12, 2026.
  4. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9Rivian Automotive, 2026 Proxy Statement (Schedule 14A), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, filed April 27, 2026.
  5. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10Mind Robotics (press release via Business Wire), Mind Robotics Appoints Doug Field as President, October 13, 2026.
  6. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane, TechCrunch, Rivian's startup Mind Robotics hires former Ford EV chief Doug Field, October 13, 2026.
  7. ^1 ^2 ^3Mind Robotics, Field Technician, Data Collection (job listing, Normal, Illinois), posted October 9, 2026, accessed October 27, 2026.
  8. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Akash Sriram, Reuters (syndicated by SRN News), Rivian spinout Mind Robotics valued at $2 billion in Series A funding round, March 11, 2026.
  9. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Reuters (syndicated by CNA), Rivian spinout Mind Robotics valued at $3.4 billion in new funding round, May 13, 2026.
  10. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Fred Lambert, Electrek, Rivian's Mind Robotics snags Doug Field, ex-Tesla and Ford EV chief, October 13, 2026.
  11. ^1 ^2Rivian Automotive, Current Report on Form 8-K (Item 5.02), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, filed November 7, 2025.
  12. ^Rivian Automotive, List of Subsidiaries (Exhibit 21.1 to the 2025 Form 10-K), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, February 12, 2026.
  13. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7Mind Robotics, Mind Robotics home page, accessed October 27, 2026.
  14. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Rivian Automotive, Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, filed July 30, 2026.
  15. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10Kirsten Korosec, TechCrunch, Rivian's RJ Scaringe thinks we're doing robots all wrong, March 15, 2026.
  16. ^1 ^2 ^3Rivian Automotive, Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, filed April 30, 2026.
  17. ^Rivian Automotive, Q1 2026 Earnings Presentation, exhibit to Form 8-K, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, April 30, 2026.
  18. ^Rivian Automotive, Q3 2025 Shareholder Letter, exhibit to Form 8-K, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, November 4, 2025.
  19. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Sean O'Kane, TechCrunch, Rivian creates another spinoff company called Mind Robotics, November 4, 2025.
  20. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Sean O'Kane, TechCrunch, Rivian spin-out Mind Robotics raises $500M for industrial AI-powered robots, March 11, 2026.
  21. ^Mike Wheatley, SiliconANGLE, Rivian's industrial automation spinoff Mind Robotics secures $500M in funding, March 11, 2026.
  22. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Sean O'Kane, TechCrunch (syndicated by Yahoo Finance), Rivian spinoff Mind Robotics raises another $400M, May 13, 2026.
  23. ^Kleiner Perkins, Mind Robotics: Building the AI-Native Robotics Platform for Manufacturing, May 13, 2026.
  24. ^1 ^2Vignesh R, Tech Funding News, Kleiner Perkins backs Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe's Mind Robotics with $400M to bring AI robots into factories, May 14, 2026.
  25. ^Mind Robotics, Mechanical Design Engineer, Wearables (job listing), posted September 15, 2026, accessed October 27, 2026.
  26. ^Mind Robotics, Mechanical Design Engineer, Tactile Sensing (job listing), posted May 18, 2026, accessed October 27, 2026.
  27. ^Mind Robotics, Research + Modeling (job listing), posted January 26, 2026, accessed October 27, 2026.
  28. ^Mind Robotics, Research Engineer (job listing), posted January 26, 2026, accessed October 27, 2026.
  29. ^1 ^2TechCrunch Events, TechCrunch, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe is betting on EVs, robots, and autonomy all at once, he'll explain why at Disrupt 2026, August 11, 2026.
  30. ^Mind Robotics, Mind Robotics job board (Ashby), accessed October 27, 2026.
  31. ^Debarghya Das, The Ultimate Neolab List, updated October 24, 2026, accessed October 27, 2026.

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Cite this page: AI Wiki. "Mind Robotics." aiwiki.ai, updated 27 Oct 2026, fact-checked 27 Oct 2026. CC BY 4.0. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/mind_robotics

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