Rivian has created its second spinoff company this year: an industrial AI and robotics venture called Mind Robotics.
The new effort will be focused around using “industrial AI to reshape how physical world businesses operate and leverage Rivian operations data as the foundation for a robotics data flywheel,” according to the company’s third-quarter shareholder letter published Tuesday.
That’s a mouthful of buzzwords, and Rivian declined to clarify beyond that explanation. On an investor call Tuesday, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said his company realized it had the chance to “develop products and robotic solutions that allow us to run and operate our manufacturing plants more efficiently.” Scaringe will serve as chairman of the board of directors for Mind Robotics, according to a filing, and Rivian is a shareholder, he said on the call.
“As much as we’ve seen AI shift how we operate and run our businesses through the wide-ranging applications for LLMs, the potential for AI to really shift how we think about operating in the physical world is, in some ways, unimaginably large,” Scaringe said on the call. “So the creation of this company is ultimately the culmination of us coming to the view that we wanted to have direct control and direct influence over the design and development of advanced AI robotics that would be very focused on industrial applications.”
Mind Robotics has already raised a $115 million seed round, which was led by VC firm Eclipse. Jiten Behl, a partner at Eclipse who also used to work at Rivian, revealed the investment in a LinkedIn post after TechCrunch previously reported the firm’s involvement in an earlier version of this story.
The launch of Mind Robotics marks the second time this year that Rivian has created a new stand-alone company. In March, the company spun out its skunkworks micromobility division into a startup called Also Inc. That new company was funded in part by money from Eclipse, with additional funding from Greenoaks Capital.
It’s unclear if Rivian employees are moving over to Mind Robotics, like was the case with Also. A Rivian spokesperson declined to say. But the company hinted at the possibility in Tuesday’s letter.
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“With our strong bench of technology talent and an innovation-driven culture, we have been able to identify additional areas of value to accelerate our mission on a wider scale while maintaining Rivian’s focus,” Scaringe wrote.
Robotics and industrial AI are hot areas for investment right now. There is a slew of humanoid robotics companies raising money and trying to ship products, including Tesla. General Motors is working on its own robotics and AI division, too.
Beyond Rivian’s announcement Tuesday, though, very little is known about what Mind Robotics will get up to. There is essentially no digital footprint for the company yet, save for the trademark application. That application is very broadly targeted and says Mind Robotics could use the trademark for everything from machinery, to vehicles, to “incubators for eggs.”
This story has been updated with new information from a regulatory filing in the third paragraph, the LinkedIn post in the fifth paragraph, and from the investor call throughout.
