Arda Raises $230 Million for Manufacturing AI

Arda, a manufacturing software startup founded by former OpenAI executive Bob McGrew, raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday. Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the funding round. Arda builds AI software to automate manufacturing and has already deployed its models with military technology company Anduril, McGrew said.

McGrew described Arda’s product as “a user interface and an agent” that helps manufacturing engineers build assembly lines faster, much as Claude or Cursor helps programmers. He said changing automation to match a new design can take three to six months, while retraining a human worker can take one day. Production may need to adapt when a weapon or drone design changes, he said.

Arda combines proprietary models, open-source models and frontier models in its software. Its co-founders include Augustus Odena, who helped start Adept and previously worked at Google and Meta, and former Palantir engineers Alex Mark and Jakob Frick. McGrew previously worked at Palantir and PayPal, and spent more than a decade as Palantir’s product and engineering lead. He joined OpenAI in 2017, worked on early models’ reasoning capabilities and left in 2024. He said he stayed through OpenAI’s November 2023 leadership turmoil to ship its reasoning product, which he called the last key breakthrough before artificial general intelligence.

Altimeter’s Apoorv Agrawal, who met McGrew while both worked at Palantir, said global manufacturing is a $16 trillion industry, including $3 trillion in the United States. He said the funding price was steep but described the long-term opportunity as very high. McGrew said robotics is next on Arda’s product roadmap and argued that factory automation could help bring manufacturing and jobs to the United States. He also said building a smartphone domestically would bring American jobs rather than take them away.

Arda, a manufacturing software startup founded by former OpenAI executive Bob McGrew, raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday. Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the funding round. Arda builds AI software to automate manufacturing and has already deployed its models with military technology company Anduril, McGrew said.

McGrew described Arda’s product as “a user interface and an agent” that helps manufacturing engineers build assembly lines faster, much as Claude or Cursor helps programmers. He said changing automation to match a new design can take three to six months, while retraining a human worker can take one day. Production may need to adapt when a weapon or drone design changes, he said.

Arda combines proprietary models, open-source models and frontier models in its software. Its co-founders include Augustus Odena, who helped start Adept and previously worked at Google and Meta, and former Palantir engineers Alex Mark and Jakob Frick. McGrew previously worked at Palantir and PayPal, and spent more than a decade as Palantir’s product and engineering lead. He joined OpenAI in 2017, worked on early models’ reasoning capabilities and left in 2024. He said he stayed through OpenAI’s November 2023 leadership turmoil to ship its reasoning product, which he called the last key breakthrough before artificial general intelligence.

Altimeter’s Apoorv Agrawal, who met McGrew while both worked at Palantir, said global manufacturing is a $16 trillion industry, including $3 trillion in the United States. He said the funding price was steep but described the long-term opportunity as very high. McGrew said robotics is next on Arda’s product roadmap and argued that factory automation could help bring manufacturing and jobs to the United States. He also said building a smartphone domestically would bring American jobs rather than take them away.