Arda, an AI manufacturing software startup founded by Bob McGrew, OpenAI’s former research chief, raised $230 million in a round valuing it at $1.5 billion, according to what the company told CNBC on Tuesday. Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the round, according to CNBC.
Arda builds AI-powered software that automates parts of the manufacturing process. McGrew said Anduril, a military technology company, is already running the company's AI models.
"It's a user interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers," McGrew told CNBC. He pointed to how long it takes to retool production whenever a weapon or drone is redesigned.
"When a design changes, you can retrain a human in a day — but it takes three to six months in order to change the automation to reflect the new design," McGrew said, according to CNBC. "We've built a software and AI product that basically allows manufacturing engineers to build assembly lines much faster."
Arda powers its software with models it developed in-house, plus open-source models and a handful of frontier ones, McGrew said. The company's other co-founders are Augustus Odena, who earlier worked at Google $GOOGL and Meta $META and helped start Adept, along with Alex Mark and Jakob Frick, both ex-Palantir $PLTR engineers, according to CNBC.
Apoorv Agrawal of Altimeter led the round for his firm. He got to know McGrew while the two were colleagues at Palantir, according to CNBC. Agrawal said most factory work is done abroad, though there is a market for repatriating it.
“Manufacturing globally is a $16 trillion industry. In the U.S. alone, it’s $3 trillion,” Agrawal said, according to CNBC. “Yes, the price is steep today, but the long-term opportunity is very high.”
McGrew said Arda's product plans call for robotics to come up next. He said that automating factories could expand U.S. production and add jobs.
"If your design changes very frequently, the only place you can really build your product is in East Asia, because you need an army of human workers who can be retrained quickly, and you can't wait for automation to catch up," McGrew said, according to CNBC.
McGrew also pointed to the Trump administration’s effort to onshore manufacturing. “No one has ever successfully built a smartphone in the U.S.,” he said, according to CNBC. “Never successfully assembled one, and so if you can build a smartphone in the U.S. that is not taking away American jobs. That is bringing American jobs.”
McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017, where he focused on how early models reasoned ahead of ChatGPT's debut, according to CNBC. He left in 2024, as a string of prominent figures exited the company, among them Mira Murati, its chief technology officer, and Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and its chief scientist. McGrew was previously Palantir's product and engineering lead for more than a decade.
McGrew had not spoken publicly about Arda before this week, according to CNBC.