OpenAI A former research director is secretly building a startup aimed at using AI to bring manufacturing back to the United States.
Bob McGrew’s latest company, Alda, has raised $230 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion, the company told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel, and Khosla Ventures.
Arda creates AI software that helps automate manufacturing. So was McGrew. Palantir’s The product and engineering leader for more than a decade said Arda’s AI models have already been deployed at military technology company Anduril.
“This is a user interface and agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude and Cursor do for programmers,” McGrew told CNBC. He pointed to the “human-intensive” nature of manufacturing and how it can take time to adapt production to new designs of weapons and drones.
“If the design changes, you can retrain a human in a day, but it takes three to six months to change the automation to reflect the new design,” McGrew said. “We’ve built software and AI products that essentially allow manufacturing engineers to build assembly lines faster.”
McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on early model inference capabilities before ChatGPT was released. He left the company in 2024 during a wave of other high-profile departures, including chief technology officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Satskeva.
“OpenAI is a great place,” McGrew said. He said he remembers being in a room with CEOs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. humanand Sutskever is “talking about what would happen if a model wrote emails for you.”
McGrew remained until a famous weekend in November 2023, when Altman was abruptly fired and then rehired. McGrew said he wants to stay on to ship OpenAI’s inference products, calling it “the last major breakthrough left before AGI (artificial general intelligence).”
“I said, if I could ship it, I would be happy with my career at OpenAI and ready to move on to something else,” he said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivers a keynote speech at the OpenAI Developer Conference at Fort Mason on September 29, 2026 in San Francisco, California.
Heather Deal | Getty Images
McGrew hadn’t talked publicly about Arda until this week, but he said the company uses a combination of proprietary models, open source models, and some frontier models to run its software. Arda’s other co-founders include helping launch Adept and previously google and Metaformer Palantir engineers Alex Mark and Jakob Frick.
Apoorv Agrawal of Altimeter led the recent funding round. He met McGrew when they both worked at Palantir. Agrawal said that although manufacturing is mostly done overseas, there is a market for bringing it back to the country.
“Global manufacturing is a $16 trillion industry. The United States alone is worth $3 trillion,” Agrawal said. “We think Arda and the vision they have outlined will continue to capture a significant portion of that. Yes, prices are skyrocketing today, but the long-term opportunity is very high.”
McGrew said robotics is on the next product roadmap and factory automation could help bring more manufacturing and jobs to the United States.
“If designs change frequently, East Asia will be the only place where you can actually build the product, because you need an army of human workers that can be retrained quickly, and you can’t wait for automation to catch up,” he said.
McGrew also highlighted the economic opportunities from the Trump administration’s focus on land-based manufacturing.
“No one has ever successfully manufactured a smartphone in the United States,” he said. “We’ve never succeeded in assembling it. So if we can manufacture smartphones in the United States, it won’t take away American jobs. It will bring American jobs.”
