13 March 2026 | News
Image Courtesy: Public Domain
Mind Robotics announced a $500 million Series A round, co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, to build and deploy AI-enabled robotic systems at industrial scale. Accel partner, Sameer Gandhi, will be joining the Board of Mind Robotics. This $500 million financing, which is expected to close later this month, follows a seed financing of $115 million led by Eclipse Capital in late 2025.
Mind Robotics is building the world’s leading industrial robotics platform, capable of performing dexterous, variable, and reasoning-intensive tasks. The company was founded to address a structural gap with current industrial automation solutions. Existing industrial robotics can perform repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks, but a large share of factory value-add work requires human-like dexterity, adaptation, and physical reasoning that classical robotics cannot address. Mind Robotics is building the AI foundation—models, hardware, and deployment infrastructure—to close that gap.
Mind Robotics, founded and led by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, operates with Rivian as a partner and major shareholder, providing a very large data flywheel for training the models and an at-scale launch environment. Grounded in a live manufacturing environment, Mind Robotics development and deployment benefit from Rivian’s electro-mechanical engineering expertise and substantial production data.
“As AI enters the physical world, we believe the largest, at-scale application for advanced robotics will be across the industrial sector,” said RJ Scaringe. “Advanced robotics are going to be critical for global competitiveness, as well as addressing the substantial industrial labor shortages that exist today. We’re building robots that will perform real tasks, in real plants, at real scale. I am grateful to have partners that believe in what we are building at Mind Robotics — looking forward to having Sameer join our Board.”
“We back leaders, and this team has a track record that speaks for itself,” said Sameer Gandhi, partner at Accel. “They helped build one of the most ambitious manufacturing operations in the EV industry. That kind of execution doesn’t happen by accident; it reflects the quality of the people behind it. RJ is a disciplined and visionary leader, and we believe AI industrial robotics enables one of the most exciting technological shifts of our time.”
“RJ is one of the very few founders who have built and scaled a vertically integrated hardware company,” said Sarah Wang, General Partner at a16z. “At Rivian, he architected the full stack — vehicle architecture, electronics, battery systems, embedded software, manufacturing processes, and supply chains — integrating each layer into a cohesive system. That kind of end-to-end systems leadership is precisely what it takes to build a generational robotics company and why we're excited to back RJ and the Mind Robotics team.”
