Mind Robotics: AI-Native Robotics for Manufacturing
Our investment in Mind Robotics
Today we’re thrilled to announce our partnership with RJ Scaringe and the entire Mind Robotics team as they bring intelligence and dexterity to industrial manufacturing.
The Work That Robots Still Don’t Do Well
Traditional industrial robotics has done one thing exceptionally well: repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks behind safety cages. Welding the same seam, torquing the same bolt, moving something from point A to point B. What it has never been able to do, and what represents the vast majority of value-add work on any factory floor, is the dexterous, adaptive work that still requires human hands. The result is a structural gap that widens every year, with hundreds of thousands of industrial roles sitting open today and that number projected to grow.
There has been no shortage of robotics startups chasing this opportunity, but most have started from the wrong end of the problem, focused on building for home environments and consumer use cases like laundry with cool demos but don’t really satisfy what manufacturing actually needs. As RJ has put it, “doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing.” The work happens in the hands. Everything else is just there to get the hands to the right place.
A Different Starting Point
In order to be successful at scale in a category as complex as this, a company needs to have access to data, quality and reliable hardware, an understanding of systems engineering, and the ability to launch at scale with a customer. Mind Robotics has all of those and then some. They are taking a full-stack approach to building, complete with foundation models, purpose-built hardware, and deployment infrastructure, designed from day one for use on the industrial floor: no stairs, no carpets, no kids or pets to navigate around. And Mind has a uniquely unfair advantage: Rivian.
A Founder Built for the Problem
RJ has spent the last decade and a half building one of the most complex physical products in the world. As the founder and CEO of Rivian, he and his team developed deep capability across batteries, actuators, motors, software, supply chain, and high-volume manufacturing, all the ingredients that go into a modern industrial robot. As he puts it, “the things to make a robot are remarkably similar to a car.”
The Mind team is solving a problem RJ has himself, born out of his own work studying the future of Rivian’s manufacturing footprint, evaluating every company working on human-skill robotics, and ultimately concluding none of them had all the ingredients to make this work at industrial scale. Rather than make Rivian’s manufacturing future dependent on companies that had never industrialized a product, he started Mind himself.
As Mind’s first customer-partner, Rivian provides to Mind what every other robotics startup has to spend years trying to manufacture: real manufacturing data, a live high-volume production environment, and the industrial systems expertise to make a robot useful on day one. Most companies in this category are still searching for their first real factory. Mind starts inside one.
Let’s Go!
Frontier AI models and robotics are reinventing enormous swaths of the real economy, and we have been actively deploying capital behind incredible founders building here for real use cases across assembly and manufacturing (Foundry Robotics), food automation (Velodex Robotics), warehouse automation (Mytra), and now Mind as they build the future of AI-powered robotics for industrial automation.
We’re proud to partner with RJ and the Mind Robotics team alongside our friends at Eclipse, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and the broader investor group as they build the AI-native robotics platform for industrial scale. Let’s go!
For more on Mind Robotics, visit mindrobotics.com and check out the company coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Techcrunch.
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