Investors Back AI Push to Remake Factory Work

Arda has raised $230 million to sell AI software that automates manufacturing, putting investors and technology executives behind a new bid to reshape work on the factory floor. The company told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday that the startup is valued at $1.5 billion. Its models already run at Anduril, a military technology company.

Who Has the Power

Bob McGrew, Arda’s co-founder and former OpenAI research chief, said the software helps manufacturing engineers build assembly lines faster. He likened its interface and agent to Claude or Cursor, tools for programmers. The pitch is speed: when a design changes, adapting production can take months if engineers need to change the automation, McGrew said, while a human can be retrained in a day.

“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,” McGrew said. “We've built a software and AI product that basically allows manufacturing engineers to build assembly lines much faster.”

That comparison puts human workers at the center of Arda’s sales case, and automation at the center of its product. The article includes no workers speaking about the shift. Instead, the company’s founders and investors lay out what factory work should become and where they expect the money to go.

Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the funding round. Altimeter’s Apoorv Agrawal led the round and met McGrew when both worked at Palantir. Agrawal said manufacturing is largely overseas and argued there’s a market for bringing it back. He put the global industry at $16 trillion and the U.S. industry at $3 trillion.

The Promise of Reshoring

McGrew said factory automation could help bring manufacturing and jobs to the United States. He also cited the Trump administration’s effort to onshore manufacturing. The account gives no figures for jobs created, factories opened or workers affected; the startup’s founder and lead investor make the case for reshoring.

“If your design changes very frequently, the only place you can really build your product is in East Asia, because you need an army of human workers who can be retrained quickly, and you can't wait for automation to catch up,” McGrew said.

He argued that assembling a smartphone in the United States would bring jobs rather than take them away. “No one has ever successfully built a smartphone in the U.S.,” he said. “Never successfully assembled one, and so if you can build a smartphone in the U.S. that is not taking away American jobs. That is bringing American jobs.”

Those are claims about a possible outcome, not reported results from Arda’s software. The article describes a product already deployed with Anduril and a plan to add robotics; it doesn't report a completed U.S. smartphone assembly line or quantify new employment.

A Bet on Automation

McGrew’s career links Arda to major technology firms. He joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on reasoning capabilities in early models before ChatGPT launched. He left in 2024, during a wave of high-profile departures that also included chief technology officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

McGrew stayed through the weekend in November 2023 when CEO Sam Altman was abruptly fired and rehired. He said he wanted to ship OpenAI’s reasoning product, which he called the “last key breakthrough left before AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. Arda combines its own proprietary models with open-source models and some frontier models, McGrew said. The 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.

Agrawal acknowledged the steep price, then pointed to the long-term opportunity. “We think that Arda, and the vision that they've outlined, will continue to capture a significant portion of that. Yes, the price is steep today, but the long-term opportunity is very high.”