Doug Field previously worked on electric vehicles at Ford and Tesla, contributed to Apple’s “not-so-secret” automotive project, and was Segway’s first employee. Now, this executive is turning his attention to RJ Scaringe, CEO of Rivian’s latest venture: Mind Robotics.
Field has been appointed President of Mind Robotics, an industrial AI and robotics startup founded by Rivian last year. The announcement was made at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, held in San Francisco from October 13 to 15. This move also signals that the one-year-old startup is preparing to scale its early operations.
Scaringe will remain involved with Mind Robotics, but the company’s day-to-day operations, including product, engineering, and operations, will be handled by Field.
Mind Robotics has raised over $1 billion in funding from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce. The company is building a full-stack solution for industrial manufacturing, with specialized robots powered by foundational models aimed at large-scale automation of industrial and manufacturing tasks.
Unlike humanoid robots being developed by companies like Tesla, Scaringe said Mind Robotics will not attempt to replicate all of human biomechanics. The startup is also using Rivian as “a real, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment,” with Rivian being Mind Robotics’ first customer.
On Tuesday at Disrupt, Scaringe said he wanted someone like Field to help run Mind Robotics, so he called Field to ask for a recommendation.
He and I then truly began to delve deeply into how we could develop robots in a highly thoughtful and intentional way, and deploy them into our society and our economy. We were highly aligned on the overall mission of this business, and more importantly, we had deep agreement on how we work and how we build teams,” he said.
Field left Ford in April, where he spent five years shaping the automaker’s electric vehicle and technology strategy. His departure was part of a broader leadership restructuring at Ford. Before joining Ford, Field led Apple’s Project Titan—the electric autonomous vehicle initiative that was canceled in 2024. He also previously served as Senior Vice President of Engineering at Tesla, overseeing the development of the Model 3 and helping the sedan emerge from “production hell.”
Field said in a statement: “Integrating AI with robotics is one of the most important and challenging engineering problems of our time. Mind has assembled an outstanding team and possesses a unique advantage: the ability to deploy and learn in real, large-scale factories from day one. I’m excited to join RJ to build the team, culture, and technology that will redefine what we can manufacture in the United States.”
Mind Robotics is Scaringe’s second company, founded outside of Rivian, with the first being Also, a micromobility company that began with high-end electric bicycles. Similar to his arrangement with Field and Mind Robotics, Scaringe serves as chairman of Also but has enlisted Chris Yu, former Chief Product Officer at Specialized, to oversee day-to-day operations.
Mind Robotics and Also are independently operated companies, but Rivian holds minority equity stakes in both. The company reported that, as of June 30, 2026, Rivian owned approximately one-third of each of these startups.