Arda Raises $230 Million at $1.5 Billion Valuation for Factory AI

Arda, the manufacturing software startup founded by former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, has raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation as it develops AI tools for factory automation.

Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the latest financing. Arda makes software for manufacturing engineers building assembly lines as product designs change. Its AI models have been deployed with defense technology company Anduril.

McGrew said a worker can be retrained for a new design in a day, while changing factory automation to match it can take three to six months. Arda’s software is intended to help engineers build assembly lines faster, narrowing the time needed to adapt production to a revised product.

McGrew described the software as an agent that “does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers.” It combines Arda’s proprietary models with open-source and frontier AI models.

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and left in 2024. He worked on the reasoning capabilities of early AI models before ChatGPT’s release. He also spent more than a decade leading product and engineering at Palantir.

Arda’s other co-founders are Augustus Odena, Alex Mark and Jakob Frick. Odena helped start Adept and worked at Google and Meta. Mark and Frick are former Palantir engineers.

McGrew has linked the company’s work to the prospect of expanding U.S. manufacturing. He said frequent design changes favor production that can adapt quickly, while automated equipment can take months to catch up. Robotics is next on Arda’s product roadmap as it pursues broader factory automation.