Firmware Engineer

Mind Robotics, founded by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, has raised over $1 billion to develop humanoid robots, with its first product expected to launch within a year. The company will operate independently from Rivian, avoiding a partial transformation strategy similar to Tesla's approach. Scaringe believes the industrial labour market opportunity could reach trillions of dollars. Rivian will serve as Mind Robotics' first customer, giving the electric vehicle maker an early technological advantage. The CEO emphasises that humanoid robots will work alongside human employees rather than replace them entirely. Simple tasks will be automated whilst complex operations remain human-operated, helping address manufacturing labour shortages.

RJ Scaringe has raised $12 billion across three startups, and investors are still queueing up. May 16, 2026 - 10:01 am Tl;dr. Rivian's founder is running three companies with $12.3B raised. Mind Robotics just hit $1B at a $3.4B valuation. RJ Scaringe has raised more than $12.3 billion across three startups, and the pace is accelerating. The Rivian founder and CEO, who holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT, is now simultaneously running an electric vehicle manufacturer, an autonomous micromobility company, and an industrial AI robotics startup, each attracting capital at a speed that would be remarkable for any single venture. The latest data point arrived this week when Mind Robotics, Scaringe's industrial robotics company, closed a $400 million round led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing its total funding to more than $1 billion and its valuation to $3.4 billion. The venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce also participated. Mind Robotics was founded in 2025, initially as an internal Rivian project called "Project Synapse," and has raised $115 million in seed funding, $500 million in a Series A in March, and now $400 million more in under two months. The company is building AI-powered robots designed to handle the dexterous, reasoning-intensive manufacturing tasks that conventional factory automation cannot, using Rivian's own production lines as a live training environment. Scaringe's second venture, Also, is an electric micromobility company spun out of Rivian in 2025. It has raised more than $300 million, including a $200 million Series C led by Greenoaks in March that valued the company at over $1 billion. DoorDash invested alongside a multi-year commercial agreement to deploy Also's purpose-built autonomous small EVs for last-mile delivery. The company's product lineup includes a $3,500 e-bike and a four-wheeled cargo EV designed to fit in a bike lane. The overwhelming majority of the $12.3 billion, more than $11 billion, went into Rivian itself, most of it between 2018 and the company's blockbuster IPO in November 2021. Rivian was founded in 2009 as Mainstream Motors and operated in near-obscurity for nearly a decade before revealing its R1T truck and R1S SUV prototypes at the 2018 Los Angeles Auto Show. The money followed quickly: Amazon led a $700 million round in early 2019, Ford invested $500 million, and by the end of that year Rivian had closed four funding rounds. A $2.5 billion raise in July 2020 and a $2.65 billion raise six months later preceded the IPO, which generated nearly $12 billion in gross proceeds at $78 per share and briefly valued the company at more than $100 billion. Today, Rivian's market capitalisation stands at approximately $18.2 billion, a significant decline that reflects the broader struggles of the EV sector. But the company continues to attract major partnerships. Volkswagen has overtaken Amazon as Rivian's largest shareholder through a $5.8 billion software joint venture, and Uber struck a deal worth up to $1.25 billion for up to 50,000 autonomous Rivian R2 robotaxis across 25 cities by 2031. What makes Scaringe unusual is not just the quantity of capital but the breadth. Supersized seed rounds have become more common in recent years, but they have generally gone to defence tech or AI startups founded by former OpenAI or Anthropic employees, not to electric micromobility or industrial robotics. Eclipse, one of Scaringe's biggest backers and a lead investor in both Also and Mind Robotics, credits his combination of engineering depth and product instinct. Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse and a former Rivian executive, described Scaringe's ability to communicate a vision without overselling as "an art." The comparison to other serial entrepreneurs who have raised billions across multiple ventures, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, is inevitable but imprecise. Multiple investors told TechCrunch that Scaringe's distinguishing quality is the absence of self-promotion. "It's not about him," one insider said. "When you talk to him, he has enthusiasm about the product that is completely external." Joe Fath, also at Eclipse, noted that Scaringe "has the rare combination of being a truly great engineer while also having an exceptional instinct for product design," a pairing he described as "incredibly uncommon." The question that follows from $12.3 billion across three companies, all run by the same person, is whether Scaringe can sustain the pace. He travels between Palo Alto, Irvine, Rivian's factory in Normal, Illinois, and a second factory under construction in Georgia. Mind Robotics is scaling rapidly, Also is preparing to deliver its first US products in 2026, and Rivian is ramping the R2 SUV while navigating a hostile tariff environment that has seen at least a dozen EV models cancelled or paused this year. The industrial robotics market is attracting capital at an extraordinary rate, with companies from 1X to Unitree to Foundation Industries all raising hundreds of millions for physical AI systems. Mind Robotics' pitch, that it has access to a live high-volume factory floor for training data, gives it a structural advantage most competitors lack. Whether that advantage translates into a durable business depends on execution at a scale that even Scaringe has not yet attempted. Behl framed the question differently. "The big question is, how much can he do?" he said. "That's a question that already assumes he's reaching his limit. The thing is, he doesn't look at it that way."

Mind Robotics today announced a $400 million financing led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing total investment in Mind Robotics to more than $1 billion. This finan...