Overview
- Mind Robotics announced on Tuesday that Doug Field will serve as president and run day-to-day product, engineering, and operations for the Rivian spinoff.
- Field is a veteran hardware executive who led teams at Tesla, Apple’s car project, and Ford, bringing experience in moving complex products from prototype to mass production.
- The startup has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, and Kleiner Perkins, and Rivian holds equity and will be Mind’s first customer.
- Mind says it is building purpose-built industrial robots that run on foundation models and will be trained inside Rivian’s high-volume factories, but it has not yet publicly shown working hardware.
- Appointing an operator with Field’s track record addresses the hard challenge of making reliable factory robots at scale, yet public proof of the systems and clear deployment timelines remain unresolved.