- Mind Robotics has raised $400 million in a new funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, with support from several new and existing investors.
- Founded in 2025 by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, the company is building AI industrial robots for factory and manufacturing work.
- The fresh funding will help Mind Robotics deploy more robots in real manufacturing settings as it competes with companies such as Figure AI and Skild AI.
California-based Mind Robotics, the industrial robotics company spun out of electric vehicle maker Rivian, has announced $400 million in new funding in a round led by Kleiner Perkins, taking the company’s total funding to more than $1 billion and increasing its valuation to $3.4 billion less than six months after it was created.
The round also saw participation from new investors such as Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, Incharge Capital, A-Star Capital, and Garuda Ventures. Existing backers, including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Prysm Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Greenoaks, also participated.
The funding announcement comes after the company raised $115 million in seed funding in late 2025 and $500 million in a Series A round in March 2026 — meaning the new round represents a roughly 70% jump in valuation in just two months.
Founded in 2025 by RJ Scaringe, Mind Robotics aims to tackle one of manufacturing’s biggest problems: traditional automation struggles with tasks that require precision, judgment, and flexibility.
The company was initially developed internally at Rivian, where it was known as “Project Synapse,” before being spun out as a standalone business in November 2025. Rivian remains a shareholder and the company’s primary deployment partner, with Mind Robotics using Rivian’s manufacturing facilities in Normal, Illinois, as a live training ground for its AI systems.
The company builds an industrial robotics platform that integrates AI, custom hardware, and deployment infrastructure. The first robots are already operating inside Rivian’s plants.
Mind Robotics is entering a competitive robotics market, competing with companies like Figure AI and Skild AI, which are also developing advanced AI robots for industrial use.
Scaringe framed the broader ambition in terms of Western manufacturing competitiveness. “There’s not a workforce that wants to do that. The cost structure can’t support being globally competitive,” he has said of repetitive factory work in the US. In his framing, Mind Robotics is part of a structural argument about how America competes with lower-cost manufacturing economies.
What sets Mind Robotics apart is its approach to creating a complete system, covering everything from AI models to hardware to deployment, rather than focusing on a single part of the robotics process.
“Robotics is the ultimate frontier. Mind Robotics has unique access to all the ingredients required to make general-purpose robotics work in real-world manufacturing,” says Ilya Fushman, the Kleiner Perkins partner leading the round.
The fresh capital will be used to expand the deployment of its AI robots in live manufacturing environments, including scaling production, improving the underlying technology, growing the team, and pushing its robotics systems deeper into real industrial operations.
