Mind Robotics Raises $500 Million as RJ Scaringe Bets on Factory Robots Over Humanoids

Mind Robotics, the industrial robotics company RJ Scaringe spun out of Rivian late last year, just closed a $500 million Series A co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz. Total funding now sits at $615 million with a roughly $2 billion valuation, all within a few months of the company’s founding.

While the rest of the robotics world is obsessed with humanoid robots doing backflips on stage, RJ is going the opposite direction. He is building traditional factory robots powered by AI that can actually do useful work on real production lines. He told The Wall Street Journal that Mind Robotics will have a large number of robots deployed by the end of this year, which is a pretty aggressive timeline for a company that barely existed six months ago.

The core idea is that today’s industrial robots are great at doing the same repetitive task forever, but a huge amount of real factory work requires dexterity, adaptability and physical reasoning that current automation just cannot handle. Mind Robotics is using Rivian’s manufacturing environment and production data as its training ground to build AI models and hardware that close that gap.

There is also a growing overlap between the two companies. Rivian announced custom silicon development in December for its autonomy platform, and RJ has hinted those chips could work just as well as robotics processors for Mind. Between ALSO, Mind Robotics and the R2 launch, Rivian is building out a much bigger technology ecosystem than most people give it credit for.