Doug Field has worked on EVs at Ford and Tesla, the not-so-secret car project at Apple, and was employee No. 1 at Segway. Now the executive is turning his attention to Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe’s latest project: Mind Robotics.
Field has been hired as president of Mind Robotics, an industrial AI and robotics venture Rivian created last year. The news, shared onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 (taking place October 13-15 in San Francisco), is another sign that Mind Robotics is getting ready to scale up its early operations just one year after its founding.
Scaringe will still be involved with Mind Robotics, but the day-to-day aspects of the business, including product, engineering, and operations, will be handled by Field.
Mind Robotics, which has already amassed more than $1 billion in backing from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce, is building a full stack for industrial manufacturing. The purpose-built robots will run on foundation models with a goal of automating industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale.
Unlike the humanoid robots being developed by Tesla and others, Scaringe says Mind Robotics won’t attempt to mimic all the biomechanics of a human. The startup is also using Rivian as “a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment,” with Rivian being Mind Robotics’ first customer.
Scaringe said on the Disrupt Stage Tuesday that he wanted someone like Field to help run Mind Robotics, and so he called him up to ask for a recommendation.
“Him and I then really began digging into how important it is that we really think deeply and very intentionally about how we develop robotics and deploy robotics into our society, into our economy, and we found such alignment in how we thought about this from the overall mission of the business, but even more important, we found really deep alignment just in how we both work and how we build teams,” he said.
Field left Ford in April after five years shaping the automaker’s electric vehicle and technology strategies. His departure was part of a wider reorganization of the automaker’s leadership. Prior to Ford, Field led Apple’s Project Titan, the electric, autonomous car project that was canceled in 2024. He also served as senior vice president of engineering at Tesla, where he oversaw development of the Model 3 and got the sedan through “production hell.”
“Integrating AI and robotics is one of the most important — and difficult — engineering challenges of our time,” Field said in a statement. “Mind has assembled an exceptional team and has a unique advantage: the ability to deploy and learn inside a real, high-volume factory from day one. I’m thrilled to join RJ in building a team, culture, and technology that will redefine what we can make in America.”
Mind Robotics is the second company that Scaringe created outside of Rivian, following Also, a micromobility play that’s starting with high-end e-bikes. Like with Field and Mind Robotics, Scaringe is involved as chairman at Also but has tapped someone to run the day-to-day: Chris Yu, the former chief product officer of Specialized.
Mind Robotics and Also operate as stand-alone companies, but Rivian has minority stakes in both. The company reported owning about a third of each startup as of June 30, 2026.
Source: techcrunch.com
