Doug Field joins Rivian spinoff Mind Robotics as president
The former Ford, Apple and Tesla engineering chief will run day-to-day operations at the $1 billion-backed industrial robotics venture.
Doug Field has joined Mind Robotics as president, putting one of the auto industry's most seasoned engineering executives in charge of day-to-day operations at the industrial AI and robotics startup spun out of Rivian. Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe announced the hire onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Field's track record covers the defining hardware programs of the last two decades: five years shaping Ford's electric-vehicle and technology strategy before departing in April, leadership of Apple's now-canceled Project Titan car effort, a senior engineering role at Tesla where he steered the Model 3 through its “production hell” stretch, and the first employee badge at Segway.
Mind Robotics spun out of Rivian last year and has assembled more than $1 billion in backing from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce. The venture is building a full technology stack for industrial manufacturing, with purpose-built robots running on foundation models aimed at automating factory tasks at scale.
The company is deliberately not chasing humanoids. Unlike the human-like robots being developed by Tesla and others, Mind Robotics' machines will not attempt to mimic human biomechanics. Instead, the startup will use Rivian's own factories as a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for training and deploying its models — with Rivian as its first customer.
Scaringe will remain involved with Mind Robotics while Field takes over product, engineering and operations. The split mirrors Rivian's first spinoff, Also, a micromobility company where Scaringe serves as chairman and former Specialized product chief Chris Yu runs daily operations. Rivian owns roughly a third of each startup, according to a June SEC filing.
In a statement, Field called integrating AI and robotics “one of the most important — and difficult — engineering challenges of our time,” adding that the venture's advantage is the ability to deploy and learn inside a real, high-volume factory from day one.