Bob McGrew, former research chief at OpenAI, has raised $230 million for his new startup, Arda, at a $1.5 billion valuation to apply artificial intelligence to U.S. manufacturing. The funding round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel, and Khosla Ventures, according to an exclusive interview with CNBC.
Arda develops AI software designed to automate manufacturing processes. McGrew, who previously served as product and engineering lead at Palantir for over a decade, stated that the company's models have already been deployed with military technology firm Anduril. He described the product as an agent that performs for manufacturing engineers what tools like Claude or Cursor do for programmers, addressing the labor-intensive nature of adapting production lines to new designs.
McGrew explained that while human workers can be retrained on a new weapon or drone design in a day, updating automation typically takes three to six months. Arda’s software aims to close this gap by allowing engineers to build assembly lines much faster. He noted that frequent design changes currently force production to East Asia, where large workforces can be retrained quickly, whereas automation lags behind.
McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on the reasoning capabilities of early models before ChatGPT launched. He departed during a wave of high-profile exits in 2024 that included Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and co-founder Ilya Sutskever. He remained through November 2023, when CEO Sam Altman was briefly fired and then rehired, stating he stayed to ship OpenAI's reasoning product, which he called the last key breakthrough before artificial general intelligence.
Alongside McGrew, Arda was co-founded by Augustus Odena, a former Google and Meta employee who helped launch Adept, as well as Alex Mark and Jakob Frick, both of whom are former Palantir engineers. Arda utilizes a mix of proprietary models, open-source models, and frontier models to run its software.
Apoorv Agrawal of Altimeter Capital led the investment after meeting McGrew at Palantir. Agrawal cited the global manufacturing industry as a $16 trillion market, with the U.S. share valued at $3 trillion. He argued that despite current high costs, the long-term opportunity for Arda to capture a significant portion of this market is substantial.
McGrew said robotics is next on the product roadmap and that automating factories could bring more jobs to the U.S. He connected this goal to the Trump administration's efforts to onshore manufacturing, noting that no one has ever successfully built a smartphone in the U.S. He argued that successfully assembling such devices domestically would create American jobs rather than take them away.