Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics laboratory that originated from electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, secured $500 million in Series A funding, with venture firms Accel and Andreessen Horowitz co-leading the investment round.
This latest financing, publicized on Wednesday, comes after a $115 million seed round spearheaded by Eclipse in late 2025. This boosts Mind Robotics’ total capital raised to $615 million within months of its establishment. The startup is now valued at approximately $2 billion, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
RJ Scaringe, Rivian’s CEO and founder, established Mind Robotics, which officially separated from Rivian in November 2025, with Scaringe acting as chairman. Scaringe’s vision is to leverage data from Rivian’s electric vehicle manufacturing facility to enhance the dexterity and adaptability of industrial robots, simultaneously using the factory as a testing ground for their practical applications.
Per a press release regarding the Series A funding, the company’s inception aimed to “address a structural gap with current industrial automation solutions.” While conventional industrial robots excel at repetitive, dimensionally stable operations, a significant portion of factory tasks demanding human-like dexterity, adaptability, and physical reasoning remains beyond their capabilities. Mind Robotics seeks to bridge this gap by developing the necessary AI framework, encompassing models, hardware, and deployment infrastructure.
Scaringe informed The Wall Street Journal that Mind Robotics plans to deploy a substantial number of robots by year-end. Since the announcement of Mind Robotics, he has consistently emphasized the startup’s commitment to conventional factory robot designs, rather than the widely publicized humanoid robots, such as those developed by Tesla, which have received considerable recent attention. Scaringe remarked to The Wall Street Journal, “Doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing.”
Apart from providing training data and a deployment site for the robots, future collaborations between Rivian and Mind Robotics could extend further. In December, Rivian disclosed its development of custom silicon designed to power its autonomous vehicle software.
During an interview with TechCrunch at the event, Scaringe hinted that it would require “not a lot of imagination” to envision Rivian supplying these custom chips to Mind Robotics. He commented, “It’s a robotics processor, so it could work really well for that.”
Mind Robotics marks the second venture Rivian has spun off in 2025. The initial spin-off was Also, an electric mobility firm that commenced operations with a premium modular e-bike and compact electric cargo vehicles for Amazon. Also also received support from Eclipse, and has subsequently secured an additional $200 million from Greenoaks Capital, reaching a current valuation of approximately $1 billion.