More than $1 billion raised, and a first president a year in. Mind Robotics, the industrial robotics company Rivian spun out in 2025, has hired Doug Field to run day-to-day work on product, engineering and operations, TechCrunch reported from Disrupt on 13 October.
Field’s career is a list of hard launches. He was employee number one at Segway, oversaw the Model 3 at Tesla through what TechCrunch called production hell, led Apple’s cancelled car project, and spent five years on Ford’s EV strategy before leaving in April.
RJ Scaringe, Rivian’s chief executive, remains involved. He said he wanted someone like Field to run the company and called Field to ask for a recommendation.
Investors include Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce. The company is building purpose-built robots meant to run on foundation models, and Scaringe says it will not copy the full biomechanics of a human, unlike the humanoids from Tesla and others.
Rivian is the first customer and acts as a high-volume factory in which to train and deploy. It is also an owner: an SEC filing for the period ending 30 June shows Rivian holds about a third of Mind Robotics.
That makes the customer, the supplier and a major shareholder the same company.
What is missing is the product. The report offers no robot specifications, no deployment count and no revenue, so the hire is a signal of intent, not of results.
