Doug Field, whose career spans roles as chief EV and tech officer at Ford, senior vice president of engineering at Tesla, head of Apple's Project Titan and employee No. 1 at Segway, has been hired as president of Mind Robotics. The news was shared onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco.
Mind Robotics spun out of Rivian last year and is building a full-stack platform for industrial manufacturing. The company's robots run on foundation models and are designed to automate industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale. Unlike humanoid robots under development elsewhere, Mind Robotics does not attempt to replicate human biomechanics, according to Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe.
The startup has already secured more than $1 billion in backing from investors including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, and the venture arms of Volkswagen and Salesforce. Rivian itself is acting as Mind Robotics' first customer, providing a live, high-volume manufacturing environment for model training and deployment.
Scaringe said onstage that he had originally called Field to ask for a recommendation for someone to run the startup, but the conversation led to Field taking the job himself. "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 and how we build teams," Scaringe said.
Field will handle product, engineering and operations at Mind Robotics, while Scaringe remains involved. Field left Ford in April as part of a wider leadership reorganization after five years shaping the automaker's EV and technology strategies. Prior to Ford, he led Apple's cancelled Project Titan and oversaw the Tesla Model 3 through its production ramp.
"Integrating AI and robotics is one of the most important–and difficult–engineering challenges of our time," Field said in a statement. "Mind has assembled a world-class team to tackle this challenge, and I am excited to help lead the effort."