Arda startup raises $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation — CNBC

In the United States, startup Arda, founded by former OpenAI employee Bob McGrew, has raised $230 million at a company valuation of $1.5 billion. The company develops artificial intelligence software for manufacturing automation, CNBC reports.

AI for manufacturing engineers

The funding round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel, and Khosla Ventures. According to McGrew, Arda’s models have already been deployed at defense technology company Anduril.

The founder described the product as an interface and an AI agent for manufacturing engineers, similar in role to Claude or Cursor for programmers. He noted that after a change in a product’s design, a worker can be retrained in a day, whereas adapting automation to a new design can take from three to six months. According to him, Arda is intended to help engineers build assembly lines for new designs faster, including for weapons or drones.

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Team and plans

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on the reasoning capabilities of early models before the launch of ChatGPT. In 2024, he left the company amid a series of departures by senior employees, including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

Arda’s co-founders also include Augustus Odena, who helped create Adept and previously worked at Google and Meta, as well as former Palantir engineers Alex Mark and Jacob Frick. To operate its product, the startup combines its own models, open-source models, and some frontier models.

McGrew named robotics as the next direction on Arda’s roadmap. In his view, factory automation could help bring some manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.