Mind Robotics, the industrial robotics startup spun out of electric vehicle maker Rivian, has closed a $500 million Series A co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz. The round values the Palo Alto-based company at approximately $2 billion, per the Wall Street Journal.

The company was founded by Rivian CEO and chairman RJ Scaringe after being spun out of Rivian in November 2025. It previously raised a $115 million seed round led by Eclipse, bringing total funding to $615 million in just a few months of operation.

Factory Data as a Training Edge

Mind Robotics is taking a different approach from many robotics startups chasing humanoid designs. Instead, it's focused on traditional factory robot form factors — the kind already found on assembly lines — but trained with AI on real-world manufacturing data from Rivian's own EV production facilities.

The core thesis: existing industrial robots excel at repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks, but a large share of factory work requires human-like dexterity, adaptation, and physical reasoning that classical robotics can't handle. Mind Robotics is building AI foundation models, hardware, and deployment infrastructure to close that gap.

Scaringe told the Wall Street Journal that Mind Robotics aims to have a significant number of robots deployed in factories by the end of 2026. The company has also signaled it may leverage Rivian's internally developed custom chips as part of a vertically integrated stack.

The raise lands amid a broader surge in industrial AI investment, with physical AI — robots that can perceive and act in unstructured real-world environments — emerging as one of the hottest sectors in venture capital.