Mind Robotics Recruits Former Ford EV Chief Doug Field to Lead Factory Robot Push

Mind Robotics, the industrial AI venture launched by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, has named Doug Field as its new President. The hire, revealed at TechCrunch’s Disrupt gathering on 13 October, signals a shift for the company from raising money to actually putting hardware to work. Field will oversee product development, engineering and day-to-day operations, while Scaringe continues to serve as founder and chair. “Doug is a remarkable leader with a track record of delivering new technologies in successful products,” Scaringe said in announcing the appointment. Field added that Mind has pulled together an outstanding team and holds a rare edge: the chance to deploy and learn inside a genuine high-volume factory from the very start.

That factory belongs to Rivian. The Normal, Illinois plant, where the R2 is currently ramping up, will act as Mind’s proving ground and its first customer relationship. Rivian holds roughly a third of the start-up, giving Mind access to a live production line for both training data and real-world deployment. Backing has been substantial: a US$115m seed round led by Eclipse, a US$500m Series A co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz in March, and a further US$400m led by Kleiner Perkins in May. The company's reported valuation now sits near US$3.4bn, with the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce among its investors.

Field’s résumé is impressive, though not without complications. He steered the Model 3 through roughly 12-18 months of what Tesla termed “production hell” as Senior Vice President of Engineering, later ran Apple’s car effort until its cancellation in 2024, and spent close to five years at Ford as Chief EV, Digital and Design Officer. Ford’s Model e division bled more than US$5bn during 2024. Even so, his skunkworks team at Ford created the low-cost Universal EV Platform that underpins a US$30,000 midsize pickup slated for Louisville in 2027.

Mind is charting a course deliberately distinct from Tesla’s Optimus humanoid programme. Scaringe has argued that humanoids are unnecessarily complicated for most factory tasks, and Elon Musk himself conceded in January that no Optimus units were yet performing “useful work” despite earlier predictions of thousands of deployments. The genuine challenge in physical AI is not foundation models but making machinery dependable enough to survive full production shifts — a problem Field has tackled throughout his career.

The appointment also mirrors a broader reshuffling of EV talent. Ford folded Field’s EV organisation into manufacturing after his April departure, and Scaringe’s other spinoff, micromobility firm Also, hired Uber’s former head of AV partnerships, Guy Peterson, this month. Rivian owns about one-third of both ventures, letting Scaringe build adjacent businesses with outside capital while keeping Rivian’s balance sheet centred on the R2. Field tackles Mind’s central risk — converting promising robots into reliable factory equipment — yet the setup concentrates much of the value in Rivian’s hands while granting it only a minority of the upside.