Former OpenAI executive launches Arda, an AI manufacturing startup valued at $1.5 billion

Bob McGrew, who used to head research at OpenAI, has unveiled Arda, a startup building artificial intelligence software to automate manufacturing. The company said in an exclusive interview with CNBC on Tuesday that it has secured $230 million in a round that values it at $1.5 billion. The funds Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures are leading the round. McGrew had not talked about Arda in public until this week.

According to Arda's website, the system takes in a product's design files (CAD drawings, PDFs, lifecycle management data and requirements), arranges the product and its parts in a single model and turns that into a full manufacturing plan: operations, tools, quality checks, fixtures, workstations and visual instructions for the shop floor. Manufacturing engineers check and adjust each step. When a new version of the design comes in, Arda updates the affected parts, stations and instructions, and if demand shifts it can move resources between product lines.

McGrew describes it as "a user interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers." He told CNBC that when a design changes, a person can be retrained in a day, but adapting a factory's automation takes three to six months. Arda's models are already in use at Anduril, the military technology company. According to its website, the system is running on several lines at a large American manufacturer, which it does not name, where some key engineering tasks have become between five and ten times faster.

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017, contributed to the reasoning abilities of the first models, before ChatGPT came out, and left in 2024, the year Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever also departed. Before that, he spent more than ten years running product and engineering at Palantir. Arda's other co-founders include Augustus Odena, one of the people who set up Adept and who had been at Google and Meta, plus Alex Mark and Jakob Frick, who come from Palantir's engineering team.

The company mixes its own models, open models and some of the most advanced ones available. Robots come next in its plans: its website says it wants to turn assembly plans into operations that robots can carry out, using existing hardware and new models. McGrew argues that automating factories could help bring more production and more jobs to the United States, at a time when the Trump administration wants manufacturing to return to the country.

Apoorv Agrawal of Altimeter, who led the round and got to know McGrew when both worked at Palantir, puts manufacturing at $16 trillion worldwide and $3 trillion in the United States. On the valuation, he acknowledged to CNBC that "the price is steep today," while seeing a very large long-term opportunity.