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Rivian’s startup Mind Robotics hires former Ford EV chief Doug Field

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Rivian’s startup Mind Robotics hires former Ford EV chief Doug Field

Doug Field has worked on EVs at Ford and Tesla, the not-so-secret car project at Apple, and was employee No. 1 at Segway. Now the executive is turning his attention to Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe’s latest project: Mind Robotics.

Field has been hired as president of Mind Robotics, an industrial AI and robotics venture Rivian created last year. The news, shared onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 (taking place October 13-15 in San Francisco), is another sign that Mind Robotics is getting ready to scale up its early operations just one year after its founding.

Scaringe will still be involved with Mind Robotics, but the day-to-day aspects of the business, including product, engineering, and operations, will be handled by Field.

Mind Robotics, which has already amassed more than $1 billion in backing from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce, is building a full stack for industrial manufacturing. The purpose-built robots will run on foundation models with a goal of automating industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale.

Unlike the humanoid robots being developed by Tesla and others, Scaringe says Mind Robotics won’t attempt to mimic all the biomechanics of a human. The startup is also using Rivian as “a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment,” with Rivian being Mind Robotics’ first customer.

Scaringe said on the Disrupt Stage Tuesday that he wanted someone like Field to help run Mind Robotics, and so he called him up to ask for a recommendation.


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