Former OpenAI Exec Launches $1.5B AI Startup to Revive U.S. Manufacturing

Arda, a manufacturing AI startup founded by former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, said Tuesday that Arda raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the round. Arda makes AI software to help automate manufacturing and aims to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. McGrew had not spoken publicly about Arda until this week.

McGrew said Arda's AI models have already been deployed with military technology company Anduril. McGrew described Arda's product as a user interface and an AI agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers. McGrew highlighted manufacturing's dependence on human labor and the time required to adapt production to a new weapon or drone design. McGrew said a human can be retrained in a day when a design changes. However, McGrew said changing automation to reflect a new design takes three to six months. McGrew said Arda's software and AI product allows manufacturing engineers to build assembly lines much faster.

McGrew said Arda runs the software using a combination of proprietary models, open-source models and some frontier models. Arda's other co-founders include Augustus Odena, who helped start Adept and previously worked at Google and Meta. Former Palantir engineers Alex Mark and Jakob Frick are also Arda co-founders.

Altimeter's Apoorv Agrawal led the recent funding round. Agrawal met McGrew when both worked at Palantir. Agrawal said manufacturing largely happens overseas but there is a market for bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. Agrawal said manufacturing is a $16 trillion industry globally. Agrawal said manufacturing is a $3 trillion industry in the U.S. Agrawal said Arda's vision could capture a significant portion of that market. Agrawal acknowledged that Arda's valuation is steep today but said the long-term opportunity is very high.

McGrew said robotics is next on Arda's product roadmap. McGrew said automating factories could help bring more manufacturing and jobs to the U.S. McGrew argued that East Asia is the only practical manufacturing location for products whose designs change very frequently. McGrew said those products require large numbers of human workers who can be retrained quickly rather than waiting for automation to adapt. McGrew highlighted the economic opportunity as the Trump administration seeks to bring manufacturing to the U.S. McGrew claimed that no one has ever successfully built or assembled a smartphone in the U.S. McGrew argued that assembling smartphones in the U.S. would create American jobs rather than eliminate American jobs.

McGrew previously worked at PayPal and served as Palantir's product and engineering lead for more than a decade. McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on early models' reasoning capabilities before ChatGPT launched. McGrew left OpenAI during a wave of high-profile departures in 2024 that included chief technology officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. McGrew described OpenAI as an amazing place. McGrew recalled discussing models that could write emails with CEO Sam Altman, Sutskever and Dario Amodei, who left to start Anthropic. McGrew stayed through the November 2023 weekend when Altman was abruptly fired and then rehired. McGrew said McGrew wanted to stay to release OpenAI's reasoning product, which McGrew called the last key breakthrough before artificial general intelligence. McGrew said releasing that product would leave McGrew satisfied with a career at OpenAI and ready to move on.