Late last year, Rivian announced the creation of a new standalone company focused on industrial artificial intelligence, called Mind Robotics.
It was the second major spin-off disclosed last year by the Irvine-based EV maker, after its micromobility business called ALSO.
By then, the company revealed that Mind Robotics had been recently set up and had secured $115 million of external seed capital.
On Wednesday, the robotics firm shared additional details about the development and announced that it has secured an extra $500 million in a Series A funding round, co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, two prominent venture capital firms.
The financing will support Mind Robotics on building and deploying “AI-enabled robotic systems at industrial scale.”
Mind Robotics was founded by RJ Scaringe, who is also the founder and CEO of Rivian, its “partner and major shareholder.”
Rivian provides the robotics firm with a “very large data flywheel for training the models and an at-scale launch environment,” the company stated.
“Advanced robotics are going to be critical for global competitiveness, as well as addressing the substantial industrial labor shortages that exist today,” Scaringe stated. “We’re building robots that will perform real tasks, in real plants, at real scale.”
Late last year, Scaringe said that Rivian was working on robotics applications beyond self-driving vehicles, a few weeks after founding Mind Robotics.
However, Scaringe did not elaborate on specific robotics applications under development.
“We are not building single-task machines. Instead, we lean on the progress in modern robotics AI to build a solution that can generalize across core tasks and be deployed across an entire plant,” the company said in a recent blog post.
“We are building a friendly robotic platform designed for safe, effective collaboration alongside humans,” it added.
Board Members
According to a press release shared on Wednesday, Accel Partner Sameer Gandhi will be joining Mind Robotics‘ Board of Directors.
Sameer was previously a Partner for Sequoia Capital, who has backed companies such as Apple, Google and Nvidia.
“We back leaders, and this team has a track record that speaks for itself,” Sameer Gandhi stated on Wednesday.
“They helped build one of the most ambitious manufacturing operations in the EV industry,” he added, noting that “that kind of execution doesn’t happen by accident; it reflects the quality of the people behind it.”
As of Wednesday, only two members of the administration are publicly known, including Ghandi and RJ Scaringe, who serves as Chairman of the Board.
Rivian on Mind Robotics
Upon announcing the founding of the robotics firm, Rivian said the company will focus on “the advancement of industrial AI to reshape how physical world businesses operate.”
The EV maker highlighted the “synergies shared between the development of autonomous driving and physical AI.”
Rivian said its goal with the spin-offs is to accelerate innovation while keeping the main business focused on scaling vehicle production and improving unit economics.
“As a company, we remain focused on our key priorities and our mission to keep the world adventurous forever,” the company said.
“With our strong bench of technology talent and an innovation-driven culture, we have been able to identify additional areas of value to accelerate our mission on a wider scale while maintaining Rivian’s focus,” it added.
