Mind Robotics Raises $500 Million to Improve Industrial Robots

Mind Robotics has raised $500 million to develop what it calls “AI-enabled” robotic systems.

The company’s Series A round, expected to close later this month, follows $115 million in seed funding Mind received last year, the startup said in a Wednesday (March 11) news release.

The company, founded and led by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, said it was created to address a need it sees in today’s industrial automation solutions.

“Existing industrial robotics can perform repeatable, dimensionally stable tasks, but a large share of factory value-add work requires human-like dexterity, adaptation, and physical reasoning that classical robotics cannot address,” the release said. “Mind Robotics is building the AI foundation—models, hardware and deployment infrastructure—to close that gap.”

Rivian is a partner and major investor in Mind Robotics, the release added, with the car company providing “a very large data flywheel” for training its models, while also offering access to its electro-mechanical engineering expertise and “substantial” production data.

“Advanced robotics are going to be critical for global competitiveness, as well as addressing the substantial industrial labor shortages that exist today,” Scaringe said. “We’re building robots that will perform real tasks, in real plants, at real scale.”

In other robotics news, PYMNTS wrote Wednesday about the idea that physical AI—meaning machines that “perceive, reason and act in the physical world”—might be the more direct path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) than software in a data center.

“Physical AI refers to systems that move beyond generating content into operating in real environments: robots, autonomous machines and the foundational models that teach them how to behave,” the report said.

“The category has been building momentum for years, but 2026 marks a credible inflection point. At CES in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared that the ChatGPT moment for robotics had arrived, suggesting the combination of AI models and computing infrastructure could soon unlock large-scale commercial adoption.”

Global humanoid robot installations came to around 16,000 units in 2025, with China making up more than 80% of deployments across logistics, manufacturing and automotive applications. Data from Morgan Stanley shows China filed 7,705 humanoid patents over a five-year period, five times the total in the U.S, and accounted for 54% of industrial robot installations worldwide.

“The adoption curve is real, and the intelligence layer being built on top of it will determine which platforms run the next phase of industrial AI,” PYMNTS wrote.