Ex-OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew's Arda raises $230M at $1.5B valuation

Arda, the AI manufacturing startup founded by former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, has raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company told CNBC on Tuesday. Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the round, with Altimeter's Apoorv Agrawal leading the deal.

Arda builds AI software that helps manufacturing engineers rebuild assembly lines when a product design changes. "It's a user interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers," McGrew told CNBC. "When a design changes, you can retrain a human in a day — but it takes three to six months in order to change the automation to reflect the new design," he said. Arda's AI models are already deployed with defense tech company Anduril. The software runs on a mix of Arda's own proprietary models, open-source models and some frontier models, and McGrew told CNBC that robotics is next on the roadmap.

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and left in 2024. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Palantir as a product and engineering lead. Arda's other co-founders are Augustus Odena, who helped start Adept and previously worked at Google and Meta, and former Palantir engineers Alex Mark and Jakob Frick.

"Manufacturing globally is a $16 trillion industry. In the U.S. alone, it's $3 trillion," Agrawal told CNBC. "Yes, the price is steep today, but the long-term opportunity is very high."