Chips & Hardware
Rivian-backed Mind Robotics hires Doug Field as president
Mind Robotics, the industrial AI and robotics venture Rivian created last year, has hired former Ford EV chief Doug Field as president to run its day-to-day operations.
Field will take over product, engineering and operations at Mind Robotics, while Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe — who created the venture and remains involved — steps back from daily management. The move, announced onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, signals that Mind Robotics is preparing to scale up just one year after its founding.
Field brings a résumé built around electric and automated vehicles: he was senior vice president of engineering at Tesla, where he oversaw the Model 3 through its “production hell” period; he led Apple’s Project Titan, the company’s electric, autonomous-car effort that was canceled in 2024; and he was Segway’s first employee. Most recently, he spent five years shaping Ford’s electric-vehicle and technology strategy before leaving the automaker in April as part of a wider leadership reorganization.
Mind Robotics has already raised more than $1 billion in backing from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce. The startup is building what it calls a full stack for industrial manufacturing: purpose-built robots running on foundation models, aimed at automating industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale. Scaringe has said that unlike the humanoid robots being developed by Tesla and others, Mind Robotics won’t try to replicate the full biomechanics of a human. Rivian itself is serving as the venture’s first customer, giving Mind Robotics a live, high-volume manufacturing environment in which to train and deploy its models.
Scaringe said he called Field directly to ask for a recommendation on who could run Mind Robotics, and the conversation turned into a hire. “Integrating AI and robotics is one of the most important — and difficult — engineering challenges of our time,” Field said in a statement. “Mind has assembled an exceptional team and has a unique advantage: the ability to deploy and learn inside a real, high-volume factory from day one.”
Mind Robotics is the second company Scaringe has built outside Rivian, after Also, a micromobility startup focused on high-end e-bikes, where Scaringe is chairman and former Specialized chief product officer Chris Yu runs daily operations. Both ventures operate as standalone companies; Rivian reported owning about a third of each as of June 30, 2026.
Why it matters
Pairing a veteran EV and autonomy executive with a well-capitalized robotics bet shows Rivian is betting its engineering talent pipeline, not just its balance sheet, on industrial automation beyond cars.