OpenAI’s former analysis chief has been quietly constructing a startup that goals to carry manufacturing again to the U.S. utilizing AI.
Bob McGrew’s latest firm, Arda, has raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the corporate informed CNBC in an unique interview Tuesday. The spherical was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures.
Arda makes AI software program to assist automate manufacturing. McGrew, who was additionally Palantir’s product and engineering lead for over a decade, mentioned Arda’s AI fashions have already been deployed with army tech firm Anduril.
“It is a person interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers,” McGrew informed CNBC. He pointed to the “human-intensive” nature of producing, and the time it might probably take to adapt manufacturing to a brand new design for a weapon or drone.
“When a design modifications, you may retrain a human in a day — nevertheless it takes three to 6 months to be able to change the automation to replicate the brand new design,” McGrew mentioned. “We have constructed a software program and AI product that mainly permits manufacturing engineers to construct meeting strains a lot sooner.”
McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and labored on the reasoning capabilities of early fashions earlier than the launch of ChatGPT. He left throughout a 2024 wave of different high-profile exits, together with chief know-how officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
“OpenAI is an incredible place,” McGrew mentioned. He mentioned he remembers being in rooms with CEO Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, who left to start out Anthropic, and Sutskever, “speaking about what it will appear to be when a mannequin might write your electronic mail for you.”
McGrew stayed by way of the well-known weekend in November 2023 when Altman was abruptly fired after which rehired. McGrew mentioned he wished to remain to ship OpenAI’s reasoning product, which he referred to as the “final key breakthrough left earlier than AGI,” or synthetic normal intelligence.
“I mentioned, if I might simply ship that, I would be pleased with my profession at OpenAI, and I would be prepared to maneuver on to one thing else,” he mentioned.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivers the keynote deal with throughout the OpenAI builders convention at Fort Mason on Sept. 29, 2026 in San Francisco, California.
Heather Diehl | Getty Photographs
McGrew, who hasn’t spoken publicly about Arda till this week, mentioned the corporate is utilizing a mixture of its personal proprietary fashions, open-source fashions and a few frontier fashions to run the software program. Arda’s different co-founders embrace Augustus Odena, who helped begin Adept and beforehand labored at Google and Meta, and former Palantir engineers Alex Mark and Jakob Frick.
Altimeter’s Apoorv Agrawal led the current funding spherical. He met McGrew once they each labored at Palantir. Manufacturing largely occurs abroad, Agrawal mentioned, however there is a marketplace for bringing it again.
“Manufacturing globally is a $16 trillion business. Within the U.S. alone, it is $3 trillion,” Agrawal mentioned. “We expect that Arda, and the imaginative and prescient that they’ve outlined, will proceed to seize a good portion of that. Sure, the worth is steep at present, however the long-term alternative could be very excessive.”
McGrew mentioned robotics is subsequent on the product roadmap, and automating factories might assist carry extra manufacturing — and extra jobs — to the U.S.
“In case your design modifications very ceaselessly, the one place you may actually construct your product is in East Asia, since you want a military of human employees who might be retrained shortly, and you’ll’t anticipate automation to catch up,” he mentioned.
McGrew additionally highlighted the financial alternative because the Trump administration appears to be like to onshore manufacturing.
“Nobody has ever efficiently constructed a smartphone within the U.S.,” he mentioned. “By no means efficiently assembled one, and so if you happen to can construct a smartphone within the U.S. that isn’t taking away American jobs. That’s bringing American jobs.”
