Former OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew launches Arda: $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation for SI on assembly lines
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
The bet is that assembly lines can be reconfigured for a new product in weeks rather than months.
The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures. According to McGrew in an interview with CNBC, Arda builds an interface and an agent that "does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers": it speeds up the design of assembly lines when a product's design changes. He says a person can be retrained in a day, but automation takes three to six months. Arda's models are already used at Anduril. The company uses its own models and open-weight models. The results data comes from the founder.
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