Mind Robotics raises $400M as total funding passes $1 billion
Led by Kleiner Perkins two months after a $500M Series A, the Rivian spin-out now has $1B+ in funding at a $3B+ valuation
Mind Robotics has closed a $400 million financing round led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing the Palo Alto industrial robotics company's total funding to more than $1 billion. New investors include Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, Incharge Capital, A-Star Capital, and Garuda Ventures alongside returning investors Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Prysm Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Greenoaks. The round values Mind Robotics at more than $3 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Volkswagen's venture arm and Salesforce also contributed.
The founder and the origin
Mind Robotics was spun out of Rivian in November 2025 by RJ Scaringe, who founded Rivian and continues to serve as its CEO. Scaringe chairs Mind Robotics while remaining chief executive of the publicly traded electric vehicle company. The project began inside Rivian under the name Project Synapse, framed around using manufacturing data from Rivian's factory to train robots capable of performing the reasoning-intensive, variable tasks that fixed industrial automation cannot handle.
Scaringe chairs Mind Robotics and leads Rivian, which provides a factory environment for development and deployment. Unnamed Tier 1 automotive suppliers have also invested in Mind Robotics.
Factory robotics
Mind Robotics is developing factory robots with AI-driven dexterity, physical reasoning and adaptability. “Doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing,” Scaringe told the Wall Street Journal.
The company describes the gap it is targeting as the structural limit of existing industrial robotics; systems that can perform repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks but cannot handle the dexterous, variable, reasoning-intensive work that still requires human labour in most factories. Rivian's factory provides both the training data and the live deployment environment to close that gap.
The funding arc
Mind Robotics has raised more than $1 billion in less than six months. The seed round of $115 million was led by Eclipse in late 2025. The Series A of $500 million, co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, was announced in March 2026 at a $2 billion valuation. Today's $400 million round led by Kleiner Perkins follows two months after the Series A closed. Volkswagen's participation connects to an existing software joint venture between VW and Rivian; the investment extends that relationship into Mind Robotics' industrial deployment infrastructure.
Mind Robotics is developing an industrial robotics platform combining foundation models, purpose-built hardware and deployment infrastructure for dexterous manufacturing tasks. It has not publicly demonstrated the robot.
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