Arda Emerges from Stealth to Speed Up American Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Arda Industries launched from stealth with $232 million in funding to speed up American manufacturing. Its software helps manufacturers quickly turn new product designs into working assembly lines. It is the first step toward a larger vision: automated robotic assembly lines that update as designs change, making it possible to build fast-changing products in the U.S.

Think of a 7,500-piece Lego set that arrives as a finished model with no instruction book. To build it from scratch, you would have to figure out the assembly order, write the instructions, and lay out the stations. Today’s phones, drones and other advanced hardware products change rapidly, requiring manufacturing engineers to work out how to assemble them each time. Arda’s AI agent does that work from the product's CAD files and other design artifacts, so a design change reaches the factory floor without halting production.

“I kept asking: why can we design the next generation of products in America, but not build them here? When a product changes every year, the factory has to be able to change with it," said Bob McGrew, founder and CEO of Arda. “Manufacturing leaders told me their products change constantly, and manufacturing engineering can’t keep pace. Their designs change at software speed, but their factories don’t. So, we built the technology platform that solves this problem. Today, U.S. manufacturers designing innovative consumer hardware products at scale can only make them in Asia. Imagine a fully automated version of Shenzhen in West Texas - that’s what we want to make possible.”

Already Deployed at Anduril

Anduril Industries is already using Arda’s product as part of its ArsenalOS manufacturing software. The two companies began working together before Arda was incorporated. Anduril found that in many cases, Arda turns days of work into hours, and hours of work into minutes. Basic work instructions that once took 10 hours can now be created in 15 minutes, while more complex engineering workflows that previously took up to 30 hours now take roughly 2.5 hours.

“Our manufacturing engineers are doing two hard things at once. They're keeping up with design teams that iterate constantly, and they're scaling production to meet demand," said Matt Grimm, co-founder and COO of Anduril Industries. "Arda helps them get design changes onto the floor faster and catch potential issues sooner. We would be behind on our production goals without it.”

Why Factories Can’t Keep Up

Hardware now changes at a software pace. Mobile phones get a new generation every year, and only about a quarter of the parts carry over from one model to the next. Defense hardware is revised as threats change. Drones, robots and data center equipment are redesigned constantly. Factories haven't kept up. While human workers can learn new instructions in a day, programming conventional automation for a single station can take three to six months and cost close to $1 million. A new phone stays at full-rate production for only about four months. By the time an automated line is ready, the product has moved on.

Across Asia, large teams of factory workers and manufacturing engineers adapt phone production lines with each new generation. In the U.S., fast-changing hardware gets built where the price can carry the labor and engineering cost, as in defense. At consumer scale, it mostly isn’t built here at all. No one has successfully built a smartphone in America.

That engineering work is also hard to staff. Manufacturing engineers are scarce in the U.S., and hiring needs often outpace the available talent. Arda helps companies get more from the engineers they already have, effectively giving each senior engineer the productivity of a team of junior engineers.

Arda is starting in defense and the data center supply chain, two of the most active parts of U.S. manufacturing. In data centers, it works with manufacturers of transformers and electrical equipment that bring power online. Next is consumer electronics: the phones, drones, and devices that change every year and have never been built at scale in America.

Next on the Roadmap: Robotics

Arda is already prototyping its next step: using AI agents to program robots to carry out its assembly plans, station by station. Traditional automation requires custom equipment, lengthy engineering work and careful calibration for each assembly step. When a product design changes, adapting that automation can take months.

Arda is developing AI agents to accelerate automation engineering so that automated lines can be updated in days rather than months. The goal is to make robotic assembly lines as quick to adapt to new designs as an assembly line staffed by people today, making it possible to assemble fast-changing consumer electronics devices in the U.S.

A Team Purpose-Built for the Mission

McGrew led product and engineering at Palantir through its first decade and helped develop its forward-deployed engineering model. He joined OpenAI when it was a small nonprofit lab, led its research team from 2018 to 2024, and left as Chief Research Officer in September 2024.

His co-founders are Augustus Odena, Arda's Chief AI Officer, who co-founded Adept and previously worked at Google Brain and Meta's TBD Lab; Alex Mark, Arda’s CTO, a former Palantir engineering leader who later worked on IRS Direct File at the U.S. Digital Service; and Jakob Frick, who previously worked at Palantir and SpaceXAI.

The team includes software engineers from Palantir, manufacturing engineers from Tesla, and AI researchers from MIT, who work on customers' factory floors against real assemblies. Building Arda takes close partnership with manufacturers and a serious research team, and the founders come out of both, at Palantir and OpenAI.

Backed by Top Investors

The $160 million Series A, at a $1.5 billion valuation, was co-led by Altimeter, Accel, and Khosla Ventures, with participation from XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC, SVAngel, and Felicis. It follows a $72 million seed round led by Accel and Founders Fund, with Khosla Ventures and XYZ Venture Capital also participating. Arda will use the funding to grow its engineering and research teams, expand deployments with manufacturers in defense, electronics, the data center supply chain, and other industries, and to develop the robotics models needed to automate assembly.