Rivian creates another spinoff company called Mind Robotics (techcrunch.com)

Rivian has launched a second spinoff this year: Mind Robotics, an industrial AI and robotics company that the automaker says will “reshape how physical world businesses operate” by using Rivian’s operations data as the foundation for a robotics data flywheel. CEO RJ Scaringe will chair Mind Robotics’ board, Rivian is a shareholder, and the new startup has already closed a $115 million seed round led by VC firm Eclipse (with a partner who previously worked at Rivian). Beyond high-level goals, public details are sparse—there’s almost no digital footprint, a broadly worded trademark filing, and Rivian declined to say whether staff are being moved into the new entity. For the AI/ML community, Mind Robotics signals a serious, well-funded push to build production-focused industrial robotics systems grounded in real manufacturing and operational telemetry. The emphasis on an operations-data-driven “flywheel” suggests ambitions to deploy continuous learning loops: collect sensor, log and process-automation data from plants, train models that improve control and perception, and iterate deployments to capture more data. That approach—combined with Rivian’s hardware know-how—could accelerate robust, safety-critical robotics for manufacturing and logistics, and positions Mind Robotics amid other large incumbents and startups (Tesla, GM, humanoid firms) racing to commercialize embodied AI. Unanswered questions about product scope, personnel, and technical roadmap leave the initiative’s ultimate impact still to be defined.