Mind Robotics (the Rivian spinoff) hires Doug Field — an EV veteran joins industrial robotics
From the Robots digest for 2026-10-13
What happened: Mind Robotics — the industrial-AI and robotics company spun out of Rivian last year — has appointed Doug Field as its president. Field is the engineer who led Tesla's Model 3 program and later ran Ford's entire EV business. The announcement came at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on October 13 (~4:50 PM ET); Electrek's report (~3:40 PM ET) adds that Field will run product, engineering and operations alongside Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, and that the company has raised over $1 billion in under a year.
What's genuinely new: A debut for the record. The robotics and automation coverage to date has centered on Tesla, Figure, Agile Robots and the Chinese industrial scene; an auto-industry-spawned industrial-AI company carrying big financing and a marquee executive hire had not appeared. The talent signal is the day's broader context: top EV-manufacturing executives moving into robotics amid the public-listing window (Agility's upcoming listing; Figure's reported NVIDIA $1B).
Watch: the first named product, customer, or deployment; confirmation of the >$1B raise in filings; and whether the company's "industrial AI" framing resolves into humanoids or something else entirely (unstated in capture).
Links: Yahoo Finance · TechCrunch · Electrek