Rivian spin-out Mind Robotics raises $500M for industrial AI-powered robots

Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics lab spun out of the electric vehicle maker Rivian, has raised $500 million in a Series A funding round co-led by venture firms Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.

The financing, announced Wednesday, follows a $115 million seed round that was led by Eclipse in late 2025, bringing Mind Robotics’ total fundraising to $615 million in the few months since its founding. This round brings the startup’s valuation to around $2 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news.

Mind Robotics was created by Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe. It was spun out of Rivian in November 2025, with Scaringe serving as chairman. The general idea is that Scaringe wants to use data from Rivian’s electric vehicle factory to train industrial robots to be more dexterous and adaptable, as well as a venue to prove out those robots’ usefulness.

The company “was founded to address a structural gap with current industrial automation solutions,” according to a press release announcing the Series A round. “Existing industrial robotics can perform repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks, but a large share of factory value-add work requires human-like dexterity, adaptation, and physical reasoning that classical robotics cannot address. Mind Robotics is building the AI foundation — models, hardware, and deployment infrastructure — to close that gap.”

Scaringe told the Wall Street Journal that Mind Robotics will have a large number of robots deployed by the end of this year. In the months since Mind Robotics was announced, he has spoken a few times about how the startup intends to focus on more traditional factory robot designs, instead of the much-hyped humanoid robots that have garnered so much attention over the last year, like those built by Tesla. “Doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing,” Scaringe told the Wall Street Journal.

Beyond the training data and a place to deploy the robots, there are other ways Rivian and Mind Robotics might collaborate moving forward. In December, Rivian announced it had been developing its own custom silicon meant to help power the autonomous vehicle software that will go on its cars.

In an interview with TechCrunch at the event, Scaringe said “it doesn’t take a lot of imagination” to think that Rivian might sell those custom chips to Mind Robotics. “It’s a robotics processor, so it could work really well for that,” he said.

Mind Robotics is the second company Rivian spun out in 2025. The first was Also, an electric mobility company that is starting with a high-end modular e-bike as well as small electric cargo vehicles for Amazon. That startup was also backed by Eclipse, and has since raised another $200 million from Greenoaks Capital, with its valuation currently sitting around $1 billion.

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Sr. Reporter, Transportation

Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.

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