Doug Field, the executive who spent five years shaping Ford’s electric-vehicle and software strategy, is taking charge of one of the most closely watched ventures in industrial robotics. Mind Robotics, the startup founded last year by Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe, has named Field its president, announcing the move on stage at a San Francisco technology conference on Tuesday.
The appointment lands just one year after the company’s founding and signals that Mind Robotics is shifting from building to scaling. According to reports, Field will take over day-to-day operations – product, engineering and the teams behind them – while Scaringe stays involved at a strategic level.
From production hell to the factory floor
Field’s career reads like preparation for exactly this job. He was Tesla’s senior vice president of engineering during the Model 3’s difficult production ramp, later led Apple’s secretive Project Titan car effort, and joined Ford in 2021 to run its EV and software division, departing this April amid a wider leadership reshuffle. He was also the first employee at Segway.
That history maps directly onto what Mind Robotics is attempting: what it calls a full stack for industrial manufacturing, with purpose-built robots running on foundation models – a class of systems now being fine-tuned for tasks well beyond the factory floor. Rather than mimicking human bodies the way Tesla’s humanoid efforts do, its machines are designed for the dexterity and physical reasoning that industrial work demands.
A billion-dollar bet with a built-in proving ground
The company has raised more than $1 billion from backers including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse and Kleiner Perkins, alongside the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce, according to reports. Rivian retains a minority stake of roughly a third – a similar holding to the one it keeps in Scaringe’s earlier micromobility venture, the e-bike company Also.
The startup’s sharpest edge may be structural rather than technical. Rivian’s plants are a live, high-volume environment for training and deploying the robots, and the carmaker is its first customer. Most robotics ventures rent lab space; this one gets to learn inside a working factory from day one.
Scaringe said he had originally called Field for hiring recommendations, and the two ended up talking at length about developing robotics responsibly within the economy – finding, he said, alignment on mission, working style and team-building. Field said integrating AI and robotics is among the hardest engineering challenges of our time.
The hire also fits a broader American industrial story. Mind Robotics is betting that heavy industry, rather than office work, is where AI agents will earn their keep first. If the venture delivers, Rivian’s production lines become both customer and classroom for a new generation of factory robots.
