Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics lab spun out of electric car maker Rivian, has raised $500 million in a Series A funding round co-led by venture firms Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.
The funding announced Wednesday follows a $115 million seed round led by Eclipse in late 2025, bringing Mind Robotics’ total funding to $615 million in its first few months. The round values the company at about $2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news.
Mind Robotics was created by Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe. The company became independent from Rivian in November 2025, with Scaringe serving as its chairman. The general idea is that Scaringe wants to use data from Rivian’s electric car factory to not only train industrial robots to be more dexterous and adaptable, but also to prove the usefulness of those robots.
According to a press release announcing the Series A round, the company was “founded to address a structural gap in current industrial automation solutions.” “While existing industrial robots can perform repeatable and dimensionally stable tasks, the majority of value-added tasks in factories require human-like dexterity, adaptation, and physical reasoning that classic robots are not capable of. Mind Robotics is building the AI foundation (models, hardware, and deployment infrastructure) to fill that gap.”
Scaringe told the Wall Street Journal that Mind Robotics plans to deploy a large number of robots by the end of this year. In the months since Mind Robotics was announced, he has spoken several times about how the startup intends to focus on more traditional factory robot designs, rather than the much-hyped humanoid robots that gained so much attention last year, such as those developed by Tesla Inc. “Cartwheels don’t create manufacturing value,” Scaringe told The Wall Street Journal.
Beyond training data and where to deploy robots, there are other ways Rivian and Mind Robotics could collaborate in the future. Rivian announced in December that it was developing its own custom silicon to enhance the self-driving car software in its cars.
In an interview with TechCrunch at the event, Scaringe said it “doesn’t take much imagination” to think that Rivian might sell these custom chips to Mind Robotics. “This is a robotic processor, so it has the potential to work very well,” he said.
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Mind Robotics is the second company Rivian spun out in 2025. The first company is also an electric mobility company that has begun developing high-end modular electric bicycles and small electric cargo vehicles for Amazon. The startup is also backed by Eclipse and has since raised an additional $200 million from Greenoaks Capital, and is now valued at around $1 billion.
