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Article: Rivian’s RJ Scaringe thinks we’re doing robots all wrong

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https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/15/rivians-rj-scaringe-thinks-were-doing-robots-all-wrong/

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2026-03-15 14:30

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If you haven’t heard, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe has another company — his third by our count. And this time it’s focused on robotics.
The serial entrepreneur is best known for Rivian, the buzzy EV maker that was thrust into the spotlight in 2018 after debuting an electric truck with its now-famous gear tunnel.
The publicly traded company is now a few months away from delivering its most important EV yet, a mid-sized SUV called the R2. This EV is cheaper to build than its flagship R1 counterpart (Scaringe tells me “roughly half” the cost), and yet, in many ways is more technologically capable. It will also be cheaper for buyers; the first version of the R2 will start at $57,990, 20% cheaper than its base R1T pickup.
And then there’s Also, the micromobility startup that began as a skunkworks program within Rivian and spun out last year backed by VC money. Also, which Rivian maintains a minority stake in, launched a pedal-assist modular electric bike and cargo quad vehicle last October. Scaringe is deeply involved with that startup as well.
Now, Scaringe has robotics on his mind. And he aptly named his new startup Mind Robotics, which I learned was not its original name. (More on that below.)
Mind Robotics was not born within the walls of Rivian, although the automaker may someday be a customer. Mind Robotics is a private company founded by Scaringe that recently raised a $500 million Series A round co-led by venture firms Accel and Andreessen Horowitz. The company, which has raised $615 million since its founding in November 2025, is now valued at about $2 billion.
I sat down with Scaringe on the sidelines of South by Southwest, of which his company is the primary sponsor, to talk about everything he’s working on. The Q&A below, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, focuses on our discussion about robotics and how his new startup is taking a new approach.
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Are you done spinning off companies?
Three companies? (pause) Probably.
Are you sure about that?
Yeah. I mean, yeah. (nods in agreement) Also [the ebike company] is here, so that’s cool. It’s nice to see. It’s cool to see the brands co-existing, which makes me happy.
Mind [Robotics] is something I’ve been working on for a while. Also was unique because it was built within Rivian, and that we spun it out. Mind … I started a whole new company, Rivian’s like a partner in it. I’m wildly bullish on it. It really benefits Riven, but I think it has the potential to be a very large business, just given the scale of what’s happening.
When did you start working on Mind?
So, Mind is an interesting story and it actually comes back to R2.
About two years ago, we were building a lot of confidence in R2. So if we’re confident in R2 that means we think there’s gonna be a lot of volume. If we think there’s gonna be a lot of volume, it means we think we’re going to need a lot of plants [factories].
And so effectively, I said, ‘Boy, if we’re gonna have to build four or five plants over the next decade, that means we’re going to spend many, many billion dollars in capex. What are these plants going to look like? And we don’t want to build a bunch of plants and then have them immediately be outdated.’
I kicked off an effort to study the future of manufacturing, and essentially came to the view that classic industrial robotics is going to continue to exist like what you see in our plant today, or in a Tesla plant or a Ford plant. But the idea of robotics with human-like skills is going to be really important.
We already had a strong thesis around AI in the physical world. I met with essentially every company that’s working on some form of robotics that can do human-like skills.
I broadly characterize it as there’s companies that fit into the category of existing industrial robotics companies. And I came to the view that they’re going to continue to exist, but not be the types of companies that build robots that can do human-like tasks.
And then there’s a new batch of companies that are all like startups, effectively. Most of which are focused on the home, surprisingly — which we could spend hours on. A very large number of these companies are focused on folding towels and doing dishes, a subset of those which are looking at industrial.
We just came to the view that the ingredients to be successful, none of them had all of those ingredients. And I felt I could build a better company.
I’m not going to build Rivian’s future manufacturing dependency on companies that have never industrialized a product or understanding or have really spent time understanding industrial operations, or that don’t have a data flywheel for training models, or that don’t have supply chains because all those companies, we would need to go help them learn how to be a real company.
I made the decision to start a new company, and then had to figure out how the governing structure is going to be like.
And on the day I launched the company, I raised a seed round, and then we just did this Series A financing.
When you originally founded it or registered, was it called something else?
What was the project name? I’ll tell you, nobody’s asked me that. (pauses) So it was “Project Synapse.”
Why?
A lot of reasons. This is a great question, no one has asked this. So the name of the company Mind, it sort of links to synapse and links to the brain.
Like firing and misfiring.
Ha, yeah exactly. And it was both because of the brain link. And then at the time, my kids were in a school called Synapse, and I was inspired by my kids and thinking about the business, so I linked them. I actually almost called the company Synapse, but it’s just too funny of a word; I wanted something simpler, but yeah, it was almost synapse.
It’s funny, one of my board members just wrote me a note and still referred to it as Project Synapse.
Who is on your board?
Myself, Jiten [Behl] of Eclipse, Sameer from Accel, and Rivian has a board representative. It’s a private company, so it’s much easier than a public company.
You talked about the different categories, is what you’re planning on doing most closely related to what Boston Dynamics is working on, which is the Atlas humanoid, but pairing up with an AI Lab [Google DeepMind]?
We’re building the models as well. We’re building the models, the robotics, and the infrastructure to deploy at scale.
Then on mechatronics and the robots itself, there has been a surprising emphasis on mimicking human biomechanics, or in some cases, even going further, making even more complex mechatronics.
I think what’s missed in industrial [robotics] and this is one of the things we really see clearly, is the work happens with the hands. So, the hands are very, very important. Everything else, from a robotic system point of view, is to get the hands to the right place. And so the ability for the robots to do really complex motions, like, let’s say, like a back flip that’s actually just means the robot has a lot of unnecessary complexity in it for the vast majority of tasks.
And I understand the purpose of showing that is to show the flexibility and capability (of the humanoid robots). But if you were to go into a Rivian facility, you will see very few people that have the type of flexibility that would enable them to do a back flip. And so it’s just when you think about deploying at scale, you want to minimize the complexity, minimize the number of failure modes, reduce power consumption.
And so I do think many of the robotic systems, particularly humanoid systems, that are being thought about for manufacturing are way too complex relative to what they do. They’re going to be human like, they’ll have hands, there’s a perception model at the top. There’s going to be the ability to adjust and X, Y and Z; there’s going to be locomotion to allow it to move. But I think, mimicking human biomechanics in a manufacturing environment misses some of the fundamental points of manufacturing, which is, it’s all hand based.
I’m trying to visualize what this will eventually look like or what the different variants will be.
So, the hands are the most complicated part of robots, though.
(Quickly jumping in) But it’s also where you focus your energy, your dollars, the spending, everything should go into the hands.
And I think the other thing to notice, if you’re building a business that is going to service a lot of different industrial sectors for manufacturing, there’s not one set of hands that’s going to be perfect.
If you think about the challenge of hands is torque amplification. If you’re picking up a large four-inch diameter steel pipe, it’s a different gripping solution than threading an M4 fastener into an aluminum casting. It’s just very different skills and very different levels of dexterity.
One of the other things that’s happening is in robotics, which is very surprising, is in the biological world we so clearly recognize that evolution has allowed us to create, like very different optimal sets of biomechanics for different things. The best thing for swimming looks very different than the best thing for running and the best thing for climbing looks different than the best thing for lifting. And because of that, humans are not particularly good at swimming. Like, if you were to put me up against a dolphin, I would lose. If you put me up against a cheetah, I would lose.
We’re more powerful, of course, in our brain. And so in manufacturing, to assume that the shape and form factor of a human is the optimal shape and form factor for all types of work, I think, just misses the fact that we didn’t evolve in a plant. Now, plants have evolved around us, which is an important point. And there’s a huge embedded brown field infrastructure that robots have to plug into. But the part that they have to plug into is they have to roughly fit in the space that humans allow for, and they have to have hands. I call that all out because we have a different perspective then I think a lot of the robots that often started from saying we’re going to work in the home, which is a very different ODD [operational design domain].
But like all these use cases that say we’re gonna do everything a human does. it’s a different ODD and therefore it’s gonna lead to a different form factor than if you said, I’m just gonna be focused on being a manufacturer.
And actually [in an industrial factory] you don’t have to deal with stairs, you don’t have carpet to tile transitions, you don’t have to worry about tripping on a cat. You don’t have to worry about stepping on a kid. So you just have much more friendly constraints for deployment at scale. And you can map the environment, and the environment doesn’t change, right?
The one thing that would change the dynamic would be any interaction with humans [in a factory].
Which is an important point.
That’s why the UI [user interface] is very important. We haven’t shown what it’s gonna look like, but I’ll give you the brief [sic]: It needs to feel friendly, because it’s gonna work a long time with humans. But it doesn’t want to feel dopey and end up with a kick me sticker on its back, right?
A lot of robotics has also gone towards these very lean, muscular forms that look very Terminator like. I don’t know why. I guess science fiction movies or something has caused the industrial design world to do that. There’s a version of robots and they all sort of blend together. They’re these very athletic sprinter body forms. I think there’s a different form factor that can feel much more approachable, but not dopey.
I’m starting to see a thread with what you did with Also, and your thinking, in terms of modularity with Mind.
Some of that, yeah.
The other thing is Rivian. If you were to ask somebody in 2018 what a 1,000 horsepower truck looks like, and you squinted, you wouldn’t think of an R1 [truck]. And so, I think the idea is you can have all this capability, but it doesn’t have to look intimidating or scary. It can be friendly — it’s a design belief and aesthetic that will carry into robotics as well.