By Akash Sriram

March 11 (Reuters) - ‌Mind Robotics, a ​startup ​spun out of EV maker Rivian, said on Wednesday it has raised $500 million in a Series A funding co-led by ‌Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.

The industrial robotics company was valued at $2 ⁠billion, according to a person close to the deal.

The funding, which is one of ‌the largest Series A rounds ‌for a robotics company, comes at a time when manufacturers are increasingly dealing with labor shortages and are under pressure to update aging ​production lines.

The Palo Alto-headquartered company is building a full-stack platform of foundation models, purpose-built robots and deployment infrastructure to automate industrial and manufacturing ⁠tasks at scale.

Accel partner Sameer Gandhi will join the company's board as part of the deal, ​which is expected to close later this month, and follows a $115 million seed round led by Eclipse Capital late ​last year.

Mind Robotics, founded by Rivian CEO ‌and founder RJ Scaringe, was spun out of the EV company in November. Rivian operates as a partner ⁠and major shareholder, providing Mind Robotics with data for training its models and an environment to launch the technology.

The startup aims to address the gap in industrial ⁠automation by developing robots that can handle tasks requiring human-like dexterity, adaptability and physical ​reasoning.

Scaringe has said the company intends to focus on more traditional factory robot designs, rather than the much-hyped humanoid robots that have garnered significant attention.

Tesla and Nvidia-backed Figure ‌AI are among many robotics companies that are building robots in a human-like form factor.

However, industry experts and ‌executives have cautioned that commercializing advanced robotics remains a long road, as ⁠training the foundation models that power ‌these systems demands vast ​amounts of data, a resource that is difficult to accumulate at scale.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by ‌Vijay Kishore)

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