Rivian’s robotics spinoff Mind Robotics said on Wednesday that it has raised $400 million in a new financing round led by Kleiner Perkins, valuing the startup at $3.4 billion.
The new raise brings the total investment in the company to more than $1 billion in roughly six months.
Mind Robotics is Rivian’s second standalone spinoff, following the micromobility company ALSO unveiled earlier in 2025.
The latest financing values the Irvine-based company at approximately 70% above its $2 billion valuation set in March, according to a person familiar with the deal structure cited by The Wall Street Journal.
Mind Robotics has now raised three rounds since launching in late 2025: a $115 million seed round, a $500 million Series A in March 2026, and Wednesday’s $400 million round.
Cumulative funding stands at $1.015 billion across the three rounds — making Mind Robotics one of the fastest-growing industrial robotics startups by capital raised.
The new round included participation from new investors Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, Incharge Capital, A-Star Capital, and Garuda Ventures, alongside existing investors Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Prysm Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Greenoaks.
The Strategic Thesis
Mind Robotics is building what its founder calls an industrial robotics platform combining foundation models, hardware, and deployment infrastructure designed to automate manufacturing tasks that current industrial robots cannot reliably handle.
“We are excited about the technology and product roadmap we are developing at Mind, with a focus on scaled deployments,” said RJ Scaringe, Founder of Mind Robotics and the Rivian Chief Executive Officer.
“We are proud to have Kleiner Perkins and our full investor coalition behind us,” Scaringe added.
The company operates on a two-component strategy.
“We’re building both a foundation model, so a brain for how to operate inside of a plant, but also the mechatronic embodiments,” Scaringe said in a recent interview.
“So the robotics to then actuate what the brain is capable of understanding.”
The framing positions Mind Robotics in a different lane from traditional industrial robotics companies, which Scaringe described as building “very classical” robots that run on “fixed motion plans” without the adaptability needed for modern manufacturing.
“Not capable of human-like skill in terms of dealing with variability, having any level of reasoning, or having any level of adaptation based upon circumstances,” he said of legacy industrial robotics.
Kleiner Perkins’s Investment Logic
Ilya Fushman, the Kleiner Perkins partner leading the round, framed the investment thesis in terms of the convergence of AI models and physical hardware.
“Robotics is the ultimate frontier,” Fushman said before praising Rivian‘s spinoff.
“It is poised to become one of the biggest markets, and advances in models and hardware are coming together to make this possible,” Fushman added. “Mind Robotics has unique access to all the ingredients required to make general-purpose robotics work in real-world manufacturing, and we’re thrilled to lead this round.”
The Western Labor Argument
Scaringe has repeatedly framed Mind Robotics‘ mission through the lens of the US manufacturing labor shortage.
“I think this is really how we both lower the cost of goods by making manufacturing a lot cheaper,” he said.
“Also allow manufacturing to really become a strength in the Western world, where we don’t have labor availability and cost of labor is also very hard to compete globally here.”
The framing connects to a broader argument Scaringe has made about Western industrial competitiveness.
“We often talk about bringing manufacturing back to the United States. One of the challenges we have, we don’t have people to work in manufacturing in the United States,” Scaringe said in an interview earlier this year with Fast Company.
“And if we plan to scale, which of course we do, we’ll need to solve this.”
The argument positions Mind Robotics as a structural response to the Chinese-versus-Western competitive dynamic that has dominated automotive sector commentary in recent years.
The Form Factor Debate
Scaringe has notably pushed back on the humanoid-only thesis that has dominated industrial robotics discourse driven by Tesla’s Optimus program and Chinese humanoid robotics ventures.
“With more imagination, we’re going to see a lot of different robotic form factors,” Scaringe said in a March interview.
The Mind Robotics CEO acknowledged that one option is “something that mimics the biomechanics of a human directly, so pure humanoid.”
But when pressed on whether humanoid robots are the dominant pathway, given investment from Tesla and Chinese competitors, Scaringe pushed back.
“The investment is right,” he said, “but I’m just calling out that I think there might be more variety. There’s going to be a lot more variety.”
