OpenAI's former research chief has been quietly building a startup that aims to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. using AI.

Bob McGrew's newest company, Arda, has raised $230 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Accel and Khosla Ventures.

Arda makes AI software to help automate manufacturing. McGrew, who was also Palantir's product and engineering lead for over a decade, said Arda's AI models have already been deployed with military tech company Anduril.

"It's a user interface and an agent that does for manufacturing engineers what Claude or Cursor does for programmers," McGrew told CNBC. He pointed to the "human-intensive" nature of manufacturing, and the time it can take to adapt production to a new design for a weapon or drone.

"When a design changes, you can retrain a human in a day — but it takes three to six months in order to change the automation to reflect the new design," McGrew said. "We've built a software and AI product that basically allows manufacturing engineers to build assembly lines much faster."

McGrew joined OpenAI in 2017 and worked on the reasoning capabilities of early models before the launch of ChatGPT. He left during a 2024 wave of other high-profile exits, including chief technology officer Mira Murati and co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

"OpenAI is an amazing place," McGrew said. He said he remembers being in rooms with CEO Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, who left to start Anthropic, and Sutskever, "talking about what it would look like when a model could write your email for you."

McGrew stayed through the famous weekend in November 2023 when Altman was abruptly fired and then rehired. McGrew said he wanted to stay to ship OpenAI's reasoning product, which he called the "last key breakthrough left before AGI," or artificial general intelligence.

"I said, if I could just ship that, I'd be happy with my career at OpenAI, and I'd be ready to move on to something else," he said.

McGrew, who hasn't spoken publicly about Arda until this week, said the company is using a combination of its own proprietary models, open-source models and some frontier models to run the software. Arda's other 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.

Altimeter's Apoorv Agrawal led the recent funding round. He met McGrew when they both worked at Palantir. Manufacturing largely happens overseas, Agrawal said, but there's a market for bringing it back.

"Manufacturing globally is a $16 trillion industry. In the U.S. alone, it's $3 trillion," Agrawal said. "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."

McGrew said robotics is next on the product roadmap, and automating factories could help bring more manufacturing — and more jobs — to the U.S.

"If your design changes very frequently, the only place you can really build your product is in East Asia, because you need an army of human workers who can be retrained quickly, and you can't wait for automation to catch up," he said.

McGrew also highlighted the economic opportunity as the Trump administration looks to onshore manufacturing.

"No one has ever successfully built a smartphone in the U.S.," he said. "Never successfully assembled one, and so if you can build a smartphone in the U.S. that is not taking away American jobs. That is bringing American jobs."