Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, the up to $5.8 billion joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen Group, has appointed Manasi Vartak as Vice President of AI and Data.
The appointment, disclosed by Vartak on LinkedIn, lands less than a month after Volkswagen Group announced that the joint venture — known as RV Tech — had successfully completed winter testing of the first reference vehicles.
The test programme covered the Volkswagen ID.EVERY1, Audi and Scout Motors brands.
Vartak joins two other Vice Presidents: Beth Harrington (VP of Programs and Business Operations) and Arjuna Siva, the joint venture’s VP of Infotainment and Connectivity.
The team is tasked with delivering the software, electronics and AI layer that will underpin up to 30 million vehicles across six brands.
Despite the joint venture’s website only showing the two co-CEOs, public filings, LinkedIn profiles, and third-party director registries now point to a dozen executives at the joint venture.
Unified Intelligence & Voice Assistant
Vartak’s LinkedIn profile lists her RV Tech tenure as beginning in 2026, without specifying a month.
The appointment was only disclosed publicly on Saturday after what she described as “two incredibly productive weeks” on the job.
The executive says on her LinkedIn that her responsibilities include covering AI and Data initiatives including ‘Rivian Unified Intelligence’ and ‘Rivian Voice Assistant’.
Both were unveiled at Rivian‘s December 11, 2025 Autonomy & AI Day.
At the event, Rivian described ‘Rivian Unified Intelligence’ as the AI platform underpinning its digital system.
The voice product — Rivian Assistant — was positioned as the next-generation in-vehicle interface.
Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid promised delivery in “early 2026” across every Rivian vehicle.
The feature was omitted from this month’s version 2026.07 over-the-air update.
Vartak’s tenure also aligns with a strategic repositioning Rivian executive Michael Shahtout described at Autonomy & AI Day.
Shahtout framed the shift as going from a “Software-Defined Vehicle to an AI-Defined Vehicle.”
The platform sits on top of the in-house Rivian Autonomy Platform inference chip.
Vartak’s Thesis
In her LinkedIn post announcing the move, Vartak framed the decision as driven by conviction that the automotive industry is at a technology inflection point.
“Cars are going through an ‘iPhone moment’; vehicles without AI won’t exist in another 5–10 years, and so every innovation can have an outsized impact,” she wrote.
On voice specifically, she said: “Voice is the future of how we will interact with software and hardware. In vehicles, voice is not a good-to-have but a must-have and I’m excited to help the best of voice AI to cars.”
She signalled upcoming product announcements in the voice category, writing: “Stay tuned for some exciting launches here.”
Vartak also described a personal connection to the product.
“As a Rivian owner, the attention and care that’s gone into the product is hard to miss, and building a B2C, vertically integrated product that I use every day is genuinely exciting,” she said.
She characterised the RV Tech team she is joining as “talented, humble, and collaborative.”
Vartak’s Background
Vartak founded Verta in 2019 to commercialise machine-learning infrastructure developed during her MIT doctorate.
She scaled the company to multi-million-dollar annual recurring revenue with Fortune 500 adoption across financial services and capital markets.
Verta was acquired by Cloudera in 2024.
At Cloudera, Vartak led the AI platform team as Chief AI Architect and VP of Product Management.
She was responsible for a business serving more than 250 enterprise customers, with year-over-year growth exceeding 25% across training, inference and generative-AI workloads.
Her MIT doctorate, completed between 2011 and 2018 under advisor Sam Madden, sat within the MIT Database Group.
Her research involved collaboration with Michael Stonebraker — the Turing Award-winning database pioneer — and Matei Zaharia, a co-founder of Databricks.
Her thesis produced ModelDB, among the first open-source systems for managing machine-learning models.
Before her doctorate, she was an AI and ML researcher at Twitter (now named X) between 2016 and 2017.
There, she built gradient-based meta-learning systems for the platform’s Home timeline at global scale.
The Co-CEOs
Vartak joins a leadership team headed by two co-CEOs whose dual structure mirrors the joint venture’s equal ownership.
Wassym Bensaid holds the CTO and co-CEO titles on the Rivian side, concurrent with his position as Rivian‘s Chief Software Officer.
His background spans software and systems engineering across the consumer, semiconductor, Internet of Things and automotive industries.
Bensaid has been the more visible of the two co-CEOs.
He described RV Tech’s software in an interview with Handelsblatt as a potential “Android of cars” — a reference operating system licensable to other automakers.
On internal friction, he said: “When you drive deep cultural and process change, you don’t only make friends.”
Carsten Helbing holds the COO and co-CEO titles on the Volkswagen Group side.
He joined Volkswagen as a graduate engineer in 2001 and has spent the subsequent 25 years at the German group.
Helbing held management positions in research and development before rising to serve as Volkswagen Group Chief Technology Engineer.
He was also a member of the Executive Board of AI-LAB, a Volkswagen Group subsidiary.
At the joint venture’s first-anniversary event in November 2025, Helbing told reporters that the RV Tech architecture “could allow for future use to also use it for ICE.”
He added that the current focus remains battery-electric vehicles.
The Executive Layer
Beyond the two co-CEOs, LinkedIn profiles and public disclosures identify at least 12 additional senior executives at RV Tech.
Martin Primus serves as Chief Financial Officer and Romi Akpala serves as Head of Legal.
Beth Harrington serves as VP of Technical Programs and Business Operations.
She describes her current role on LinkedIn as “Building the future of the Software Defined Vehicle.”
Arjuna Siva serves as VP of Infotainment and Connectivity.
Siva previously held roles at Rivian, Apple, Research In Motion and Google.
Aly Huelman serves as Head of People, a role she has held since the joint venture’s formation in November 2024.
Huelman joined RV Tech from Rivian, where she spent four years in progressively senior human-resources positions.
She served as Senior HR Business Partner from May 2023 to October 2024, as Senior Manager, Talent Management from January 2022 to April 2023, and as Manager, Org Effectiveness from October 2020 to December 2021.
Eric Hulser serves as Senior Director, Vehicle, Fleet and Factory Applications.
His career spans Tesla, Waymo, Blur Studio and Rivian.
He completed the Wharton Executive CTO Program in 2023 and is based in Los Gatos, California.
Gerard Joyce serves as Senior Director, Systems Engineering and Systems Safety.
Joyce was promoted to the RV Tech role from a Senior Director, Systems Safety position at Rivian.
Jason Shiverick serves as Director of AI Platforms.
Shiverick was previously a Principal Data Scientist at Rivian.
He led work on vehicle telemetry and advanced driver-assistance systems data infrastructure.
Michael Flynn serves as Director, Core Data. Based in New York, Flynn joined RV Tech from Rivian.
Oscar Espinoza serves as Senior Staff Technical Product Manager, Multimodal AI.
Based in San Francisco, Espinoza previously worked on the Origin autonomous ride-hailing vehicle at Cruise.
Pranil Vora serves as Senior Manager, AI Platform.
Vora personally demonstrated Rivian Assistant to journalists at the December 2025 event, in a presentation reported by Kelley Blue Book.
Ziyad Abdel Khaleq leads agentic-AI work at the joint venture.
Where They Work
The executive layer is distributed across RV Tech’s expanding footprint.
The joint venture is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
Additional sites include Los Gatos, San Francisco, Irvine, Vancouver, Berlin, Sweden and Serbia.
Berlin was added as a new RV Tech location in late 2025, according to Volkswagen Group disclosures.
Why the Hire Matters
Vartak’s appointment lands at a pivotal moment for RV Tech.
The joint venture has, through successful winter testing, validated the production-intent zonal architecture.
That architecture will underpin the Volkswagen ID.EVERY1 in 2027 and the first Audi with the full Rivian-developed software stack in 2028.
With the core architecture milestone cleared, attention is shifting to the AI and data layer.
Attention is also shifting to the commercial prospects of the consumer voice product.
Rivian‘s voice AI delivery has already slipped beyond its “early 2026” commitment.
Rivian Assistant was announced at Autonomy & AI Day as the product of a two-year internal development effort.
The product was initially planned with a two-tier structure, according to Kelley Blue Book.
It was not included in the version 2026.07 OTA update delivered this month.
The Financial Backdrop
RV Tech was established in November 2024 as part of an up-to-$5.8 billion commitment from Volkswagen Group to Rivian.
RJ Scaringe, Rivian founder and CEO, described the deal at SXSW in March 2026 as “the largest software licensing deal in the history of the automotive industry”.
Of the total, $4 billion had been disbursed to Rivian by the end of March 2026.
A further $1 billion is scheduled as a non-recourse loan in October 2026.
A final $500 million tranche is expected in 2027, contingent on the start of joint vehicle production.
Analysis of Rivian‘s SEC filings by Der Spiegel in March 2026 found that Volkswagen Group‘s true cost for the partnership this year approaches €2.3 billion ($2.6 billion).
The figure adds operational funding to the equity and loan tranches.
Volkswagen Group is responsible for 75% of RV Tech’s running costs, the outlet reported.
The Winter Test Milestone
The March 27 milestone was central to the joint venture’s operating narrative.
It also unlocked a fresh $1 billion payment from Volkswagen Group to Rivian, as EV previously reported.
Testing took place over several months in Phoenix, Arizona and Arjeplog, Sweden.
The programme validated the interaction between hardware and software for functions including all-wheel drive, traction control, driving performance and over-the-air updates.
Oliver Blume, CEO of Volkswagen Group, said the winter tests demonstrated “once again how quickly and precisely” the joint venture was working.
Blume added that the group intends to “become the global automotive tech driver.”
Individual approval drives in Germany and Sweden with brand development leadership marked the formal completion of the programme.
Vartak’s arrival followed within weeks.
