Arda, co-founded by former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, raises $230M at $1.5B valuation

Arda, a startup co-founded by former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew, has raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company told CNBC. Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures led the round.

Arda makes AI software that helps manufacturing engineers build assembly lines faster. The company says its models are already deployed with defense company Anduril. McGrew says reconfiguring automation for a new design takes three to six months, compared with about one day to retrain a human worker. A later post by journalist Andrew Curran repeats the funding figures and says McGrew describes the product as doing for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers.