Rivian has created its second spinoff company this year: an industrial AI and robotics venture called Mind Robotics.
The new effort will be focused around using “industrial AI to reshape how physical world businesses operate and leverage Rivian operations data as the foundation for a robotics data flywheel,” according to a the company’s third-quarter shareholder letter published Tuesday.
That’s a mouthful of buzzwords, and Rivian declined to clarify beyond that explanation. On an investor call Tuesday, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said his company realized it had the chance to “develop products and robotic solutions that allow us to run and operate our manufacturing plants more efficiently.” Scaringe will serve as chairman of the board of directors for Mind Robotics, according to a filing, and Rivian is a shareholder, he said on the call.
“As much as we’ve seen AI shift how we operate and run our businesses through the wide-ranging applications for LLMs, the potential for AI to really shift how we think about operating in the physical world is, in some ways, unimaginably large,” Scaringe said on the call. “So the creation of this company is ultimately the culmination of us coming to the view that we wanted to have direct control and direct influence over the design and development of advanced AI robotics that would be very focused on industrial applications.”
Rivian did say Tuesday that it has secured around $110 million in “external seed capital” for Mind Robotics, but did not offer other information about the new company. A trademark application for Mind Robotics was submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Monday that lists Eclipse partner Jiten Behl as a signatory for the newly-created company, along with Eclipse’s Palo Alto headquarters as the corporate address. Behl did not immediately respond to a …