The company’s development of an industrial robotics platform can benefit from EV manufacturer Rivian’s electro-mechanical engineering expertise and substantial production data.
PALO ALTO, Calif.—Mind Robotics was founded in 2025 to address a structural gap with current industrial automation. Now, as the company works to build and deploy AI-enabled robotic systems at industrial scale, it will be backed by a $500 million Series A financing round, the company said in a release.
The financing, co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, is expected to close in late March. It follows a seed financing of $115 million led by Eclipse Capital in late 2025. Along with the financing, Mind Robotics announced that Accel Partner Sameer Gandhi will join its board of directors.
Mind Robotics is building an industrial robotics platform capable of performing dexterous, variable, and reasoning-intensive tasks. Although existing industrial robotics can perform repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks, a large share of factory value-add work requires human-like dexterity, adaptation, and physical reasoning that classical robotics cannot address.
Mind Robotics is building the AI foundation—models, hardware, and deployment infrastructure—to close that gap.
The company, founded and led by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, operates with Rivian as a partner and major shareholder. This partnership is reported to provide “a very large data flywheel for training the models and an at-scale launch environment.” Because Mind Robotics is grounded in a live manufacturing environment, its development and deployment of an industrial robotics platform is said to benefit from Rivian’s electro-mechanical engineering expertise and substantial production data.
“As AI enters the physical world, we believe the largest, at-scale application for advanced robotics will be across the industrial sector,” Scaringe said in a statement. “Advanced robotics are going to be critical for global competitiveness, as well as addressing the substantial industrial labor shortages that exist today. We’re building robots that will perform real tasks, in real plants, at real scale. I am grateful to have partners that believe in what we are building at Mind Robotics—looking forward to having Sameer join our Board.”
“We back leaders, and this team has a track record that speaks for itself,” Accel’s Gandhi stated in in the release. “They helped build one of the most ambitious manufacturing operations in the EV industry (at Rivian). That kind of execution doesn’t happen by accident; it reflects the quality of the people behind it. RJ is a disciplined and visionary leader, and we believe AI industrial robotics enables one of the most exciting technological shifts of our time.”
Mind Robotics, headquartered in Palo Alto, stated it is building “the full-stack platform of foundation models, purpose-built robotics, and deployment infrastructure to automate industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale.” The company employs “a rapidly growing team with deep expertise spanning AI, robotics, and industrial manufacturing.”
“RJ is one of the very few founders who have built and scaled a vertically integrated hardware company,” said Sarah Wang, general partner at a16z, in the release. “At Rivian, he architected the full stack—vehicle architecture, electronics, battery systems, embedded software, manufacturing processes, and supply chains—integrating each layer into a cohesive system. That kind of end-to-end systems leadership is precisely what it takes to build a generational robotics company and why we’re excited to back RJ and the Mind Robotics team.”