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AI NewsRivian spin-out Mind Robotics raises $500M for industrial AI-powered robots

Rivian spin-out Mind Robotics raises $500M for industrial AI-powered robots

6:29 AM IST · March 12, 2026

Rivian spin-out Mind Robotics raises $500M for industrial AI-powered robots

Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics lab spun out of the electric vehicle maker Rivian, hasraised$500 million in a Series A funding round co-led by venture firms Accel and Andreessen Horowitz. The financing, announced Wednesday, follows a $115 million seed round that was led by Eclipse in late 2025, bringing Mind Robotics’ total fundraising to $615 million in the few months since its founding. This round brings the startup’s valuation to around $2 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, whichfirst reported the news. Mind Robotics was created by Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe. It was spun out of Rivian in November 2025, with Scaringe serving as chairman. The general idea is that Scaringe wants to use data from Rivian’s electric vehicle factory to train industrial robots to be more dexterous and adaptable, as well as a venue to prove out those robots’ usefulness. The company “was founded to address a structural gap with current industrial automation solutions,” according to a press release announcing the Series A round. “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.” Scaringe told The Wall Street Journal that Mind Robotics will have a large number of robots deployed by the end of this year. In the months since Mind Robotics was announced, he has spoken a few times about how the startup intends to focus on more traditional factory robot designs, instead of the much-hyped humanoid robots that have garnered so much attention over the last year, likethose built by Tesla. “Doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing,” Scaringe told The Wall Street Journal. Beyond the training data and a place to deploy the robots, there are other ways Rivian and Mind Robotics might collaborate moving forward. In December, Rivian announced it had been developing its own custom silicon meant to help power the autonomous vehicle software that will go on its cars. In an interview with TechCrunch at the event, Scaringe said “it doesn’t take a lot of imagination” to think that Rivian might sell those custom chips to Mind Robotics. “It’s a robotics processor, so it could work really well for that,” he said. Mind Robotics is the second company Rivian spun out in 2025. Thefirst was Also, an electric mobility company that is starting with ahigh-end modular e-bike, as well as small electric cargo vehicles for Amazon. That startup was also backed by Eclipse, and has sinceraisedanother $200 million from Greenoaks Capital, with its valuation currently sitting around $1 billion.

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OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating

OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating

Twenty-five leading mathematicianssigned an open letterarguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they seek to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems. Each signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, considered the most prestigious prize in mathematics. This week, NYU professor Tristan BuckmasteraccusedOpenAI of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator who works for Anthropic for solving an important math problem, and wondered if the company had used their work with Codex to produce its owngroundbreaking proofover a marathon weekend of inference. On Thursday, OpenAIwithdrewits sponsorship of a math event at CalTech after the company was criticized by researchers at the university. While the ability of AI models to solve the world’s outstanding mathematical challenges could be a boon to humanity, the signatories of the new letter argue that will only be the case if those solutions can be understood and communicated by the math community and, ultimately, the rest of the world. “Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others,” they wrote — and OpenAI’s proof remains unverified. “As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. Moreover, without the willing mathematicians who must take care of their development and integration into the mathematical canon, AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost.” With other mathematicians growing paranoid and wondering if their Codex use was in turn fed into OpenAI’s new models, there is real fear that the culture of open research will be threatened. Today, if frontier labs see a useful path to a discovery, they can spend tens of millions of dollars using LLMs to beat the original researchers to a proof — a dynamic that will incentivize secrecy. This letter follows theLeiden Declaration, released by a working group of mathematicians in June. That document also grapples with the ways that LLM proofs will change their work and offers a set of recommendations for mathematicians, institutions, and policymakers. As with software engineering and other areas where AI tools are changing workflows, mathematicians find a justification in the work around the work: The value in math isn’t just the proofs and who gets credit, but the intellectual super-structure that nourishes students, finds new questions and ideas, and integrates them into broader human civilization. And if you don’t particularly care about the cutthroat world of high-stakes mathematical proofs, don’t forget: Your field of interest is next. “The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place,” they wrote.

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Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

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Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data

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Nscale adds former OpenAI exec Fidji Simo to its board ahead of potential IPO

Nscale adds former OpenAI exec Fidji Simo to its board ahead of potential IPO

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