Our Journey with RJ Scaringe: Why We Are All In on the Rivian Ecosystem

By Jay Park, Matt Roberts, and Denny Hua

The first time we met RJ Scaringe, he told us that team and culture are the only durable competitive advantage.

That was the summer of 2018. RJ was already nine years into his startup journey, yet Rivian was still in stealth. A search for the company's name returned nothing.

What struck us in that first conversation was how it was not just about electric vehicles. RJ talked about reimagining transport itself: the data captured by a modern vehicle fleet, what that data would make possible, and how autonomy would arrive in the world. This was four years before AI entered the mainstream. We left convinced we had met a next-generation American industrialist, and as such, Rivian was Prysm Capital's first investment.

The Vision

Great founders describe a future the rest of the market cannot yet see, then build toward it with purposeful patience. Rivian went from stealth to revealing the R1T and R1S, partnering with Amazon as an anchor investor and fleet customer, and building a software joint venture with Volkswagen Group. To date, Rivian has put more than 40,000 electric delivery vans and more than 180,000 total EVs on the road.

But the vision we heard when we first met RJ was always bigger than one company. Electrifying the global vehicle fleet requires many form factors, including much smaller ones. And the data flowing through those fleets would one day power autonomy far beyond the highway.

That future is now arriving as two companies: ALSO and Mind Robotics. Prysm is an investor with board roles in both.

ALSO: Rethinking the Smallest Vehicles on the Road

ALSO was incubated inside Rivian and spun out in March 2025. The premise is simple: if electric cars can deliver a radically better experience through software and vertical integration, the same should be true for the billions of trips too short to justify a car at all.

In October 2025, ALSO unveiled its first products : the TM-B e-bike and the TM-Q pedal-assist quad, with Amazon signing on to purchase thousands of customized cargo quads for delivery across the U.S. and Europe. In December 2025, we participated in the $200M Series C led by Greenoaks, which was announced alongside a multi-year autonomous delivery partnership with and investment from DoorDash.

The logistics opportunity is what excites us most. A cargo quad that carries 400 pounds of packages and travels in the bike lane is a far more efficient complement to the delivery van in dense urban settings. ALSO extends the fleet thesis we first heard from RJ in 2018 down to the smallest vehicles on the road.

Today, we are proud to announce that we are leading ALSO's Series D: a $150M round with participation from existing investors Eclipse Capital and Greenoaks.

Mind Robotics: The Same Thesis, on the Factory Floor

Mind Robotics began inside Rivian and spun out in November 2025. The company builds AI-powered robots for factory and industrial environments. In March, we invested in Mind's $500M Series A round co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, and then again in May as the second largest investor in a $400M Series A-1 round led by Kleiner Perkins.

The moats of the next decade will be built on proprietary data, and Mind has access to live manufacturing data from Rivian and Volkswagen that others simply do not. The company brings together talent from AI foundation models, perception systems, and large-scale manufacturing. Its roadmap begins with pilot deployments inside Rivian's own plants, scaling toward broader industrial deployment over the following years. The company is rethinking the viability of manufacturing in the U.S.: strengthening domestic supply chains, easing labor shortages, and creating a new category of jobs as automation becomes more commonplace.

We also believe Mind arrives at a necessary moment. In 1900, roughly 40% of American workers were on farms; today, it is under 2%. In 1940, about a quarter of the workforce worked on factory floors; today, it's under 9%. Automation has always shifted work rather than ended it, and with the developed world facing a structural labor shortage, intelligent automation is how manufacturing returns to the U.S. at scale.

Our Conviction

At Prysm, we partner with founders building category-leading companies in large, growing markets. More than that, we back extraordinary people. RJ has now built three companies from a single, coherent vision, and each one expands the surface area of that original 2018 conversation.

As RJ put it recently: "By 2030, it'll be inconceivable to buy a car and not expect it to drive itself." The vehicles, the data, and the manufacturing are one story.

Our conviction and excitement around the evolving Rivian ecosystem has never been stronger.

The Journey Ahead

Nearly a decade after that first meeting, we are reinvesting in the relationship as the ecosystem born out of a generational founder's vision takes shape.

We have been so inspired by the shared journey that we took RJ's statement about team and culture as the only durable competitive advantage to heart and have adopted it as our own operating principle.

Prysm is proud to support RJ and the teams at ALSO and Mind as they redefine what transportation looks like at every scale, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with the founder we believe is the next great American industrialist.

Disclaimer: For informational purposes only. Not an offer of any securities or of the investment advisory services of Prysm Capital, L.P. References in this piece are provided solely for illustrative purposes to highlight aspects of Prysm Capital's investment approach and do not purport to represent all investments made by Prysm Capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results.