Arda, a manufacturing software start-up founded by former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, has raised $230m at a valuation of $1.5bn, CNBC reports.
The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures. Arda builds AI tools and an agent to help manufacturing engineers set up and change assembly lines more quickly, and McGrew said its models are already in use at defence technology company Anduril. He told CNBC that reconfiguring factory automation for a new design can take three to six months, compared with a day to retrain a worker.
McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017, worked on its reasoning models and left in 2024, having previously spent more than a decade at Palantir. Arda uses its own models alongside open-source and frontier models. Its co-founders include Augustus Odena, formerly of Adept, Google and Meta.
Source: CNBC
