Bob McGrew, OpenAI's former research chief, has raised $230 million for his startup Arda at a $1.5 billion valuation, in a round led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures. Arda sells AI software that helps manufacturing engineers build assembly lines faster, and McGrew said its models are already deployed with military tech company Anduril. He argued that adapting automation to a new design can take three to six months, compared with a day to retrain a human, which is why products with frequently changing designs are mostly built in East Asia. Altimeter's Apoorv Agrawal, who led the round, said global manufacturing is a $16 trillion industry, with $3 trillion in the U.S. alone. McGrew said robotics is next on the roadmap, with the aim of bringing more manufacturing and jobs back to the U.S.
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