Mind Robotics, the physical-AI startup spun out of electric-vehicle maker Rivian, has raised $400 million in fresh funding, pushing its total backing past $1 billion and cementing unicorn status barely six months after launch. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and will fund the deployment of the company's AI-powered robots inside real manufacturing plants.
A Rivian spin-out chasing factory automation
Founded in November 2025 by Rivian co-founder RJ Scaringe, the Palo Alto, California company is building what it calls a "full-stack platform of foundation models, purpose-built robotics, and deployment infrastructure" to automate dexterous, reasoning-intensive manufacturing tasks. Rather than single-task machines, Mind Robotics is betting on systems that generalize across core factory jobs and scale across domains.
Rivian as the first customer and data engine
Rivian is both a strategic shareholder and Mind Robotics' first customer, supplying a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment. That access feeds a "data flywheel" of production data that the startup says lets it iterate rapidly — a structural advantage few robotics newcomers can match.
Investors pile into physical AI
Kleiner Perkins led the round, joined by new backers Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, Incharge Capital, A-Star Capital and Garuda Ventures, alongside returning investors including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Prysm Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Greenoaks. The company previously raised $115 million in seed financing in late 2025 and a $500 million Series A in March 2026.
The deal lands amid a wave of capital flooding into robot intelligence. It echoes Generalist AI's $400M raise and General Intuition's $320M round, while hardware-first players such as Apptronik continue to attract mega-rounds of their own.
Reporting based on coverage from The Robot Report and New Market Pitch.