Arda makes AI software that helps automate manufacturing. McGrew, who was also Palantir's product and engineering lead for over a decade, described the product as “a user interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers.”
McGrew argued that manufacturing is human-intensive, and that adapting production to a new design for a weapon or drone takes time. When a design changes, he said, retraining a human takes a day, but it takes three to six months to change the automation to reflect the new design. Arda's software, he said, allows manufacturing engineers to build assembly lines much faster.
The company is using a combination of its own proprietary models, open-source models and some frontier models. Arda's co-founders include Augustus Odena, who helped start Adept and previously worked at Google and Meta, and former Palantir engineers Alex Mark and Jakob Frick.
McGrew said robotics is next on the product roadmap, and that automating factories could help bring more manufacturing, and more jobs, to the US. If a design changes very frequently, he said, the only place to really build a product is East Asia, because it requires an army of human workers who can be retrained quickly. Building a smartphone in the US, he said, “is not taking away American jobs. That is bringing American jobs.”
Altimeter's Apoorv Agrawal, who led the funding round and previously worked with McGrew at Palantir, said manufacturing globally is a $16 trillion industry and a $3 trillion one in the US alone. “We think that Arda, and the vision that they've outlined, will continue to capture a significant portion of that. Yes, the price is steep today, but the long-term opportunity is very high,” he said.
McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on the reasoning capabilities of early models before the launch of ChatGPT. He left in 2024 during a wave of exits that included chief technology officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. He said he stayed through the November 2023 episode when Sam Altman was briefly removed and then rehired, in order to ship OpenAI's reasoning product, which he called the last key breakthrough left before AGI.