Former OpenAI exec has quietly built $1.5 billion startup, betting AI can revive U.S. manufacturing

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OpenAI's former research chief has been quietly building a startup that aims to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. using AI.

Bob McGrew's newest company, Arda, has raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures.

Arda makes AI software to help automate manufacturing. McGrew, who was also Palantir's product and engineering lead for over a decade, said Arda's AI models have already been deployed with military tech company Anduril.

"It's a user interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers," McGrew told CNBC. He pointed to the "human-intensive" nature of manufacturing, and the time it can take to adapt production to a new design for a weapon or drone.

"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."

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on the reasoning capabilities of early models before the launch of ChatGPT. He left during a 2024 wave of other high-profile exits, including chief technology officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

"OpenAI is an amazing place," McGrew said. He said he remembers being 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 stayed through the famous weekend in November 2023 when Altman was abruptly fired and then rehired. McGrew said he wanted to stay to ship OpenAI's reasoning product, which he called the "last key breakthrough left before AGI," or artificial general intelligence.

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