Mind Robotics hires former Ford EV chief Doug Field

Mind Robotics has hired Doug Field — who has worked on EVs at Ford and Tesla, led Apple’s secretive car project, and was employee No. 1 at Segway — as president of the industrial AI and robotics venture that Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe spun out of the automaker last year. The move, announced onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, is a sign that Mind Robotics is getting ready to scale up its early operations just one year after its founding. Scaringe will remain involved with Mind Robotics, but Field will handle its day-to-day product, engineering, and operations work.

Mind Robotics has already raised more than $1 billion in backing from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce. The startup is building a full stack for industrial manufacturing, with purpose-built robots that run on foundation models aimed at 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; it’s also using Rivian as “a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment,” with Rivian serving as Mind Robotics’ first customer.

Scaringe said on the Disrupt Stage that he called Field directly to ask for a recommendation on who should run Mind Robotics, and the conversation turned into Field taking the job himself. Field left Ford in April after five years shaping the automaker’s electric-vehicle and technology strategy, part of a wider leadership reorganization. Before Ford, he led Apple’s Project Titan, the electric, autonomous-car project that was canceled in 2024, and served as senior vice president of engineering at Tesla, where he oversaw development of the Model 3. “Integrating AI and robotics is one of the most important — and difficult — engineering challenges of our time,” Field said in a statement.

Mind Robotics is the second company Scaringe has spun out of Rivian, following Also, a micromobility venture starting with high-end e-bikes; as with Mind Robotics, Scaringe serves as chairman at Also while former Specialized chief product officer Chris Yu runs day-to-day operations there. Both Mind Robotics and Also operate as standalone companies, with Rivian holding minority stakes — about a third of each, as of June 30, 2026.

Why it matters

Field’s hire signals that Mind Robotics is moving from a research-stage spinout toward building out the operational discipline of a company trying to scale industrial robotics inside a real factory, the same high-volume manufacturing proving ground Scaringe is also betting will set it apart from humanoid-robot rivals.