Rivian Automotive Inc. founder and Chief Executive RJ Scaringe’s startup Mind Robotics said today it has raised $500 million at a $2 billion valuation in an early-stage round co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.

Mind Robotics is extremely ambitious, intending to build a full-stack robotics platform that incorporates multipurpose robots plus the foundation models required to make them intelligent and autonomous. It’s also building the deployment infrastructure needed to bring its robots into industrial and manufacturing environments.

Accel partner Sameer Gandhi will join Mind Robotics’ board following the Series A round, which is set to close before the end of the month, the company said. It comes after the startup closed on $115 million in a seed funding round led by Eclipse late last year.

Mind Robotics was spun out of Rivian in November. Rivian is a publicly traded electric vehicle manufacturer, and it is both a partner and a major shareholder of Mind Robotics. It provides the startup with the data it needs to train its foundation models and its factories will give it an ideal environment to test and launch its robots once they’re ready.

The startup sees itself becoming a major player in industrial automation, developing more sophisticated robots that can perform complex tasks that require human-like adaptability, dexterity and advanced reasoning.

In a press release, Mind Robotics said it was founded to address a “structural gap with current industrial automation solutions.” Though robots are already widespread in factories, they remain somewhat limited. They can only really automate repeatable and “dimensionally stable” tasks in factories, but they fall short when it comes to the more complex and nuanced aspects of manufacturing.

Scaringe told the Wall Street Journal in an interview that Mind Robotics intends to deploy a “large number” of its robots in Rivian’s factories by the end of the year. In the months since the startup was first announced, he has talked at length about its focus on more traditional robot designs, as opposed to the “humanoid” style robots popularized by Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. His reasoning is simple: “Doing cartwheels does not create value in manufacturing,” Scaringe said.

Rivian intends to help Mind Robotics in other ways. For instance, it will also give the startup access to the custom processors it’s developing for its own autonomous vehicles, once they’re ready.

Today’s round is one of the largest Series A deals by any robotics firm, and it comes at a time when the manufacturing industry grapples with labor shortages and pressure to accelerate automation to deal with it. Both startups and established companies are racing to try to aid the industry.

Though Tesla has stolen many of the headlines, Mind Robotics has a lot of rivals. Just yesterday, Rhoda AI emerged from stealth with $450 million in funding, and the German startup Neura Robotics GmbH is believed to be chasing an even bigger raise of $1.2 billion, according to reports earlier this month. The likes of Vention Inc., Sitegeist GmbH, Bedrock Robotics Inc., LimX Dynamics Inc. and RobCo Inc. have also raised money this year.

Despite investor’s considerable enthusiasm for robotics companies, many experts have cautioned that anyone trying to commercialize advanced robots faces a tough task. For one thing, training the foundational models required to power autonomous robots is incredibly tricky, as it requires vast amounts of hard-to-obtain data.

Mind Robotics is not the first company to have been spun out from Rivian. It has also birthed a startup called Also Inc., a micromobility firm that’s developing a high-end modular e-bike and small electric cargo vehicles for Amazon.com Inc. Also was also backed by Eclipse in its $105 million seed funding round, and has since raised an additional $200 million, bringing its valuation to around $1 billion.

Photo: Rivian Automotive