Rivian's robot spinoff Mind Robotics hires ex-Ford EV chief Doug Field

If you have followed electric cars over the last 15 years, you have probably run into his name. Field has worked at almost every company that tried to rethink the car.

• Segway: employee No. 1, per TechCrunch.
• Apple, first stint: vice president of Mac hardware engineering, The Verge reports.
• Tesla, 2013 to 2018: chief vehicle engineer and senior vice president of engineering. He oversaw the Model 3 and helped get the sedan through what became known as "production hell."
• Apple, second stint: vice president of special projects and de facto head of Project Titan, Apple's electric, self-driving car effort. Apple canceled it in 2024.
• Ford, 2021 to April 2026: ran the automaker's EV and software division. He left in April as part of a wider reshuffle of Ford's leadership, TechCrunch says.

The big picture: Field's whole résumé is about one hard problem. Taking a new technology out of the lab and into something that gets built in large numbers.

Mind is an industrial AI and robotics startup. RJ Scaringe, Rivian's founder and CEO, created it in 2025. It started inside Rivian under the code name Project Synapse, as an effort to build "robotics with human-like skills," TechCrunch reported in March.

The company builds the whole stack. That means purpose-built robots, the AI foundation models that run them and the systems to deploy them in factories.

A foundation model is a large AI model trained on huge amounts of data, which can then handle many tasks. Chatbots run on foundation models trained on text. Mind wants one trained on how real things get built.

On its own website, Mind Robotics says it is "building universally capable robots to transform industrial work," starting on the factory floor.

Mind says it is collecting video data at industrial scale, capturing live work on the production line as it happens. Its models learn from skilled operators performing dexterous tasks: the actions, the tools, the context and the decisions behind each step.

In real life Think of a new hire who spends weeks watching the best person on the line. They notice how that person wiggles a stubborn connector into place, not just what the manual says. Mind wants its robots to learn the same way, from many hours of real shifts.

The company lists four kinds of work it is training for:

• Pick and place: grabbing parts that sit at different angles or are partly hidden.
• Sorting: telling apart items that look alike and routing each one correctly at line speed.
• Fastening: joining parts that don't always line up, adjusting force and order, and recovering when something goes wrong.
• Connectors: getting a secure fit on flexible wiring harnesses with tight tolerances.

Why it matters: Classic factory robots are great at the same motion repeated perfectly. Mind is going after the messy jobs that have always needed human hands. The robot can drop as many connectors as it likes during training, and nobody has to crawl under the conveyor to find them.

Rivian is Mind's built-in classroom. Scaringe describes Rivian as "a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment," according to TechCrunch.

• Data: Mind uses AI training data from Rivian, The Verge reports.
• Testing: the robots will be tested first in Rivian's factories.
• First customer: Rivian will be the first buyer.
• Ownership: Rivian reported owning about a third of Mind as of June 30, 2026.

Scaringe has said he wants to keep the two companies separate rather than fold robots into the carmaker, The Verge notes. That is a different path from Tesla, which builds its Optimus humanoid in-house. We covered how hard that is in our story on Tesla's Optimus production ramp.

Scaringe says Mind won't try to copy all of the biomechanics of a human, TechCrunch reports. The Verge adds that the company hasn't confirmed whether it is building a humanoid design or something else entirely.

The catch: nobody outside the company has seen a Mind robot yet. The startup has not shown its robots in public. Mind's site describes hardware that "works alongside the people and systems already in place."

That puts Mind in a crowded and busy field. Tesla and Hyundai are among the companies pursuing humanoid robots for factory and warehouse work, The Verge notes. It is a very exciting time to be a robot, and a slightly confusing time to guess what one will look like.

A lot of people. Mind has raised more than $1 billion in under a year.

The latest round valued Mind at more than $3 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, as cited by TechCrunch. Investors include Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce. Volkswagen also has a software joint venture with Rivian.

By the numbers: Mind has 32 open positions, The Verge reports, across research, hardware, robotics software and more. The company is based in Palo Alto, California.

Scaringe will stay involved as chairman. Field will run the day-to-day business, including product, engineering and operations, TechCrunch reports.

Field's job is to turn a well-funded research effort into robots that actually work on a real production line. That is the same leap he worked on with the Model 3.

Scaringe told the Disrupt audience he called Field to ask for a recommendation for the role. The two then started talking about how to build and deploy robots "into our society, into our economy," and found they agreed on the mission and on how to build teams.

In a statement, Scaringe called Field "a remarkable leader with a track record of delivering new technologies in successful products." He added: "That's exactly what Mind needs as we deploy robots into real factories and beyond."

In his own statement, Field called integrating AI and robotics one of the most important, and most difficult, engineering challenges of our time. Then he named what he sees as Mind's edge:

"Mind has assembled an exceptional team and has a unique advantage: the ability to deploy and learn inside a real, high-volume factory from day one."

He added that he is "thrilled to join RJ in building a team, culture, and technology that will redefine what we can make in America."

No. Mind is the second company Scaringe has spun out of Rivian. The first is Also, a micromobility company that is starting with high-end e-bikes.

The setup is similar. Scaringe is chairman at Also, and Chris Yu, the former chief product officer of Specialized, runs it day to day. Also has raised more than $300 million, per TechCrunch. Rivian owns about a third of it too.

What's next: Field starts building out the team, and the first test is Rivian's own vehicle lines. If Mind's robots work there, other manufacturers become the obvious next customers.

• Nothing to buy yet: Mind's robots are not on sale and have not been shown in public. This is a factory story, not a gadget story.
• Watch the factory floor: if robots learn messy jobs like plugging in wiring, cars and other products could get built faster and with fewer defects over time.
• Physical AI is getting real money: more than $1 billion for one startup in under a year shows how much investors are betting on AI that works with its hands, not just with words.