Doug Field named president of Rivian's Mind Robotics — SkimNews
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- Doug Field was named president of Mind Robotics, where he'll run product, engineering, and operations alongside founder and CEO RJ Scaringe.
- Field's career includes serving as Tesla's SVP of Engineering through the Model 3 launch, leading Apple's car effort inside its Special Projects Group, and nearly five years at Ford as chief EV, digital and design officer.
- Mind Robotics, spun out of Rivian by Scaringe last year, has raised roughly $1 billion across three rounds in under a year: a $115 million seed led by Eclipse, a $500 million Series A co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, and a $400 million round led by Kleiner Perkins that Reuters reported valued it at $3.4 billion.
- Rivian is Mind's major shareholder and launch customer, giving the startup access to a live, high-volume plant in Normal, Illinois where the R2 is ramping; Rivian delivered 19,248 vehicles in Q3.
- Tesla's Optimus program offers a stark contrast: Musk predicted about 10,000 Optimus robots built in 2025, admitted in January that none were doing "useful work," and Tesla ended Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert those lines for Optimus.
- Mind has not shown a product publicly and hasn't confirmed whether its hardware is humanoid, betting instead on foundation models plus "purpose-built" robot hardware trained on a real assembly line — no stage demos, no unit targets.
Why it matters: Field's hire directly addresses the bottleneck every robotics program, Tesla's Optimus included, has hit: getting robot hardware reliable enough to run real factory shifts. Mind now has a $1 billion war chest, Rivian's high-volume plant as launch customer, and a president whose entire career has been lab-to-mass-production hardware.
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