Former OpenAI research lead shifts to factory Agent: raises $232 million, compresses 10-hour work to 15 minutes

Beating AI News Flash: Arda, the AI company founded by former OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, has officially launched and announced the completion of a $160 million Series A funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion. The round was co-led by Altimeter, Accel, and Khosla Ventures. Combined with a previously raised $72 million seed round, total funding has reached $232 million. In March of this year, The Wall Street Journal also reported that the company was seeking funding at a $700 million valuation — its valuation has now more than doubled.

Arda builds AI Agents for manufacturing engineers — essentially a factory version of Claude Code. Engineers upload CAD drawings and design documents, and the AI can plan assembly sequences, arrange workstations, write operating instructions, and update production plans after design changes. U.S. defense tech company Anduril has already integrated it into its ArsenalOS manufacturing system. According to both parties, basic work instructions that previously took 10 hours to write now take only 15 minutes; complex engineering processes have also been shortened from up to 30 hours to about 2.5 hours.

McGrew noted that workers may be able to learn a new process in a single day, but adapting a traditional automated production line to a new design often takes 3 to 6 months. Arda's next step is to enable AI to directly program and adjust industrial robots, compressing production line changeover cycles to just a few days. However, this capability is still in the prototype development stage, and the products already in use mainly serve manual assembly lines.