Mind Robotics Names Ex-Ford EV Chief Doug Field President

Doug Field, who left Ford in April after five years as the automaker's EV and technology chief, has a new job: president of Mind Robotics, the industrial-AI startup founded by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. TechCrunch broke the news Tuesday at its Disrupt 2026 conference in San Francisco.

Field's resume is the point. Before Ford he led Apple's Project Titan, the autonomous car effort Apple shut down in 2024. Before Apple he was senior VP of engineering at Tesla, where he oversaw Model 3 development. Earlier still, employee number one at Segway.

Mind Robotics has raised more than $1 billion from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse and Kleiner Perkins, plus the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce. It builds purpose-built robots that run on foundation models, trained inside Rivian's own plants, described in company materials as "a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment." Rivian held approximately a one-third stake in Mind Robotics as of June 30, 2026.

"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," Scaringe said of the hire.

It lands as our third factory-foundation-model story in two days on the robotics tracker, after Industrial Next's BMW pilot.