Dive Brief:
- Mind Robotics, a company founded by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe in late 2025, has named former Ford Motor Co., Apple and Tesla executive Doug Field as its new president, per an Oct. 13 press release.
- Mind Robotics is building robots to transform industrial work, using AI-powered foundation models and hardware with enough dexterity and physical reasoning to perform complex manufacturing tasks. Field will work closely with Scaringe and will oversee all aspects of the business, including product, engineering and operations, per the release.
- “Doug is a remarkable leader with a track record of delivering new technologies in successful products, and I couldn’t be more excited to be building Mind with him,” said Scaringe, in a statement. “He has an incredible ability to foster great teams that take on big, complex ideas and deliver products that reset expectations.”
Dive Insight:
Mind Robotics is building a full-stack platform of foundation models, purpose-built robots, as well as the infrastructure to automate industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale. Its team has deep expertise across AI, robotics, and industrial manufacturing, per the release.
Rivian is a key customer and the launch partner of Mind Robotics, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with Scaringe serving as chairman of the startup. The electric vehicle maker is providing a live, high-volume EV manufacturing environment at its factory in Normal, Illinois, for model training and robotics deployment.
Mind Robotics’ data pipeline is centered around learning from skilled human operators as they perform highly dexterous tasks, giving its foundational models a deep understanding of real-world physics, variance, and material behavior, per the company. But it’s not building human-like robots like Tesla and BMW, instead its goal is to make manufacturing more competitive by augmenting human worker capabilities, per its website.
“Integrating AI and robotics is one of the most important and difficult engineering challenges of our time,” Field said in a statement. “Mind has assembled an exceptional team and has a unique advantage: the ability to deploy and learn inside a real, high-volume factory from day one.”
Field rejoined Ford from Apple in September 2021, where he began his career, to serve as CTO, reporting directly to Ford President and CEO Jim Farley. Prior to that he led the development of the Model 3 while serving as senior vice president-engineering at Tesla.
However, he left Ford in May 2026 after the automaker established a new, end-to-end Product Creation and Industrialization unit to help reduce EV development costs and boost profits. Field most recently served as Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer, and elected to leave the company in May following the reorganization.
