**[OpenAI's Former Head of Research Moves to Factory AI Agent: Raises $232 Million, Reduces 10-Hour Work to 15 Minutes]** Beating AI News Flash: Bob McGrew, former Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, has officially unveiled his AI company, Arda, which announced the completion of a $160 million Series A funding round, bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion. This round was co-led by Altimeter, Accel, and Khosla Ventures. Combined with the previous $72 million seed round, the total funding now stands at $232 million. Back in March, *The Wall Street Journal* reported that the company was seeking funding at a $700 million valuation, which has now doubled. Arda focuses on creating AI Agents for manufacturing engineers, essentially a factory version of Claude Code. Engineers can upload CAD drawings and design documents, and the AI can plan assembly sequences, allocate workstations, draft operation instructions, and update production plans following design changes. U.S. defense technology company Anduril has already integrated Arda into its ArsenalOS manufacturing system. According to disclosures from both parties, basic work instructions that previously took 10 hours to write can now be completed in just 15 minutes, while complex engineering processes have been reduced from a maximum of 30 hours to approximately 2.5 hours. McGrew noted that while workers can often learn new procedures in a single day, adapting traditional automated production lines to new designs typically takes 3 to 6 months. Arda's next step is enabling AI to directly program and adjust industrial robots, aiming to compress production line transformation cycles to just a few days. However, this capability is still in the prototype development stage, and the products currently in use primarily serve manual assembly lines. [Original Link]