Ex-OpenAI Exec's Arda Targets US Factory Jobs

Bob McGrew, OpenAI's former research chief, has raised $230 million for Arda, an AI manufacturing software startup now valued at $1.5 billion. The company told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday. Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the round. It’s a big bet on a sector long tied to overseas production.

Arda builds AI software to automate factory work. McGrew said the company has already deployed its models with military technology company Anduril. He described the product plainly: “a user interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers.”

Why Automation Is Slow

Manufacturing is “human-intensive,” McGrew said, and that’s the bottleneck. Adapting a production line to a new weapon or drone design can take a long time. “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. “We’ve built a software and AI product that basically allows manufacturing engineers to build assembly lines much faster.”

The delay affects workers. Each month a line waits for new automation is another month a company may decide to keep production in a place with more people who can be retrained quickly.

From OpenAI to a Startup

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on the reasoning capabilities of early models before ChatGPT launched. He left in 2024, during a wave of high-profile departures that included chief technology officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. “OpenAI is an amazing place,” he said. He recalled sitting in rooms with CEO Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, who left to start Anthropic, and Sutskever, “talking about what it would look like when a model could write your email for you.”

McGrew also stayed through the weekend in November 2023 when Altman was abruptly fired and rehired. He wanted to stay and ship OpenAI’s reasoning product, which he called the “last key breakthrough left before AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. “I said, if I could just ship that, I’d be happy with my career at OpenAI, and I’d be ready to move on to something else,” he said.

Until that week, he hadn’t spoken publicly about Arda. The company uses its own proprietary models alongside open-source models and some frontier models to run its software. 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.

Investors Bet on Reshoring

Apoorv Agrawal of Altimeter led the funding round. He met McGrew when both worked at Palantir. Agrawal said manufacturing largely happens overseas, but there’s a market for bringing it back. “Manufacturing globally is a $16 trillion industry. In the U.S. alone, it’s $3 trillion,” he said. “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.”

Robotics comes next on Arda’s roadmap, McGrew said, and factory automation could help bring manufacturing and jobs to the United States. “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,” he said. He also pointed to the Trump administration’s effort to onshore manufacturing. “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.”

That’s the pitch. Whether reshored factories bring stable, well-paid work back to American communities depends on choices software alone won’t settle.

Why This Matters:

A startup valued at $1.5 billion is betting that software can pull the next wave of factory jobs back to the United States. The founders argue that automation stands between American workers and the assembly lines that have moved overseas. Real people are at the center of that argument: workers who could be retrained in a day, but may wait months for machines to catch up. Will automation create good jobs or simply shrink the workforce? That question matters most to those workers and their families. The sums involved are large, and the public has a stake in how they’re spent. Manufacturing that returns to the country should come with protections, training and accountability, not just promises that jobs will follow. Officials and investors alike should answer how any gains will be shared with the people who build these products and run these lines.