Mind Robotics, a Rivian spin-out, secures $500M to develop AI-powered industrial robots

Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics lab spun out of 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, comes after a $115 million seed round led by Eclipse in late 2025, bringing Mind Robotics' total funding to $615 million in just a few months since the company's founding, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the development. The latest round values the startup at roughly $2 billion.

Mind Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe created Robotics. The company was spun out of Rivian in November 2025, with Scaringe taking on the role of chairman. The broader idea behind the venture is that Scaringe wants to use data from Rivian's electric vehicle factory to train industrial robots to become more dexterous and adaptable, while also using the factory environment to demonstrate their effectiveness.

According to a press release announcing the Series A financing, the company "was founded to address a structural gap with current industrial automation solutions." The statement added that "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 expects to have a significant number of robots deployed by the end of this year. Since the company was unveiled, he has spoken several times about its intention to focus on more conventional factory-robot formats rather than the highly publicised humanoid robots that have attracted widespread attention over the past year, including those developed by Tesla. "Doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing," Scaringe told The Wall Street Journal.

In addition to using Rivian's training data and factory floor as a deployment environment, there may be other areas where Rivian and Mind Robotics work together going forward. In December, Rivian said it had been developing its own custom silicon designed to support the autonomous vehicle software used in its cars.

Speaking in an interview at the event, Scaringe said that "it doesn't take a lot of imagination" to see how Rivian could potentially sell those custom chips to Mind Robotics. "It's a robotics processor so that 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 startup that began with a premium modular e-bike and small electric cargo vehicles for Amazon. Eclipse also backed that company and later raised another $200 million from Greenoaks Capital, bringing its valuation to around $1 billion.