Mind Robotics, a Rivian spin-out, lands $500M for industrial AI robots

Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics lab that emerged from electric vehicle maker Rivian, has secured $500 million in a Series A funding round co-led by venture capital firms Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.

Announced Wednesday, the financing follows a $115 million seed round led by Eclipse in late 2025, bringing Mind Robotics’ total fundraising to $615 million within just a few months of its founding. According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, this round values the startup at roughly $2 billion.

Mind Robotics was created by Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe. It spun out from Rivian in November 2025, with Scaringe serving as chairman. The core idea is that Scaringe wants to leverage data from Rivian’s electric vehicle factory to train industrial robots to become more dexterous and adaptable, while also providing a setting to demonstrate the robots’ practical value.

According to a press release announcing the Series A, the company “was founded to address a structural gap with current industrial automation solutions. 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 large number of robots deployed by the end of this year. Since the startup was announced, he has mentioned several times that it intends to focus on more traditional factory robot designs, rather than the highly hyped humanoid robots that have attracted so much attention recently, such as those built by Tesla. “Doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing,” Scaringe told the Wall Street Journal.

Beyond providing training data and a deployment environment, there are other potential areas of collaboration between Rivian and Mind Robotics. In December, Rivian announced that it had been developing its own custom silicon to help power the autonomous vehicle software that will go into its cars.

In an interview with TechCrunch at the event, Scaringe said “it doesn’t take a lot of imagination” to consider 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 launching 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 an additional $200 million from Greenoaks Capital, with its current valuation around $1 billion.