Rivian Plant to Get First Mind Robotics Robots in Mid-2027, CEO Says

Rivian Founder and Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe said Mind Robotics, the robotics company he founded, plans to put its first robots in a Rivian plant in the middle of 2027, where they will initially be able to handle about a fifth of the tasks. Mind, which is based in Palo Alto, California, is on really aggressive product timelines, including putting the first robots in a Rivian plant in the middle of next year, Scaringe said in a conversation published by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins on Monday. Kleiner Perkins led a 400 million dollar funding round for Mind in May.

The date is more specific than the timelines he has given before. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported after an interview with Scaringe that the startup would have a large number of robots deployed by the end of the year. This summer he said the first robots would land in a Rivian plant in the early part of 2027, and now it is the middle of next year. Mind website said by September that its first robots are learning on the job with Rivian as its first manufacturing partner, training on active vehicle lines. That describes data collection and training, not the production work Scaringe now dates to mid-2027.

In the beginning we are going to be able to do about 20 percent of the tasks in the plant, but over time we want to grow that to 80 percent, Scaringe said. At launch the robots will handle pick-and-place work like moving parts from a rack into a fixture, with the goal of reaching 80 percent on the same hardware as the AI model gets better. Rivian in-house chip, the RAP1 behind the R2 Gen 3 hardware, is also being deployed in Mind robots, giving the silicon a second customer from the start. Rivian established Mind in November 2025 and held 53.5 percent at the end of that year, according to its filings; its stake is now 31 percent. Doug Field, the engineer who ran the Tesla Model 3 program and later Ford entire EV operation, is now president of Mind Robotics.