RJ Scaringe has raised more than $12B across three startups and investors still want more

Investors can't seem to get enough of RJ Scaringe or his ideas. In less than a decade, the serial entrepreneur best known for his EV company Rivian has raised more than $12.3 billion from venture capital firms, as well as from strategic and institutional investors for his three — and counting — startups. If the latest $400 million raise for his new venture Mind Robotics is an indicator, investors are still happily piling in.

Outsized raises for newly minted startups have become more common in recent years. But those hundred-million-plus seed rounds have generally been reserved for buzzy defense tech startups or AI companies founded by former OpenAI or Anthropic employees. Those supersized seeds certainly weren’t flowing toward something as niche as an electric micromobility startup.

And yet in 2025, Scaringe raised $105 million for exactly that — a startup called Also, which he founded that same year. The total has since surpassed $300 million, with DoorDash among its backers. Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse and former chief growth officer at Rivian, has spent years watching and learning from Scaringe.

His firm is now one of Scaringe’s biggest backers, leading rounds in both Also and Mind Robotics — Scaringe’s industrial AI and robotics startup that he also founded last year. Storytelling and communication are one of his superpowers, according to Behl, who joined Rivian when the company had just a handful of employees. “When RJ explains a certain issue, topic, opportunity, vision, he just has this very unique ability to communicate it so effectively, and it comes across so credible,” Behl said.

“He’s not trying to undersell the difficulty or oversell the opportunity, and that’s an art.” Scaringe isn't the only serial entrepreneur to repeatedly attract massive amounts of capital, but founders who can raise billions across multiple ventures remain rare. A self-professed car enthusiast who earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT, Scaringe joins a small cadre of entrepreneurs that includes Tesla CEO and SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anduril and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, and Jack Dorsey, who founded Square (now called Block) and Twitter. The difference, at least in the view of some investors TechCrunch spoke to, is that he is able to separate selling the idea from selling himself.

The pace of Scaringe's fundraising over the past eight years is particularly notable and doesn't seem to be slowing. More than $11 billion, and by far the largest slice of VC and strategic capital, went into Rivian — most of it between 2018 and its blockbuster IPO in 2021. Rivian also continues to land notable backers through high-profile deals like the $5.8 billion joint venture with Volkswagen Group and a robotaxi partnership valued at up to $1.25 billion with Uber.