Having worked on the Model 3, Apple’s car project and Ford’s electric vehicle strategy, Doug Field is taking on the role of chief operating officer at a start-up that has already raised over a billion dollars.
Announced on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the arrival of Doug Field as President of Mind Robotics gives a leading industrial profile to the company created last year by RJ Scaringe, boss of Rivian. Field was one of Segway's first employees, supervised Tesla's Model 3 engineering, led Apple's autonomous car project (abandoned in 2024), and then spent five years leading Ford's electric vehicle and technology strategy, which he left in April 2026. It will take over the product, engineering and operations on a daily basis.
Industrial robots that don't imitate humans
Mind Robotics develops a complete pile of AI and robotics to automate manufacturing using foundation models, without seeking to reproduce human morphology as competitors rely on humanoids. Rivian, which owns about a third of the capital, serves as the first customer: its plants provide a large volume production environment to train and deploy the models. The company raised more than $1 billion from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins and Volkswagen and Salesforce investment funds.
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