Arda Industries Launches With $232M to Speed Factory Line Design
Arda Industries launched with $232M to sell AI software that helps factories design and reconfigure production lines.
Accel, Altimeter, Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures led the investment. They were joined by XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC, SVAngel and Felicis.
The company is led by co-founder and CEO Bob McGrew, former chief research officer of OpenAI Group PBC and earlier head of engineering at Palantir Technologies Inc. Co-founders Augustus Odena, Alex Mark and Jakob Frick also held technical roles, SiliconANGLE reported.
Arda offers an AI platform that it says can speed the workflow. Users can upload a blueprint of the product they want to make, and the software automatically plans a production line, determines which robots should be used and how manufacturing quality should be monitored, and generates visual work instructions for factory employees.
Companies such as handset makers refresh their devices regularly, and every product update can require a production line reconfiguration that costs millions of dollars. Arda says its platform can speed that task as well.
The difficulty of reconfiguring production lines partly stems from the way industrial robots are programmed. Developers write scripts to automate manual work; even picking up an item requires accounting for its shape, weight, position on the conveyor belt and other parameters. When a parameter changes, the script must be updated. Changes also cascade: if a manufacturer adds an extra part to a device in an early stage of the production workflow, all subsequent stages have to be updated as well, creating more work for developers.
According to Arda, its platform lets customers complete engineering tasks that usually take days in a few hours. Its installed base currently comprises manufacturers in the defense and data center electronics markets. In the former segment, Arda is helping Anduril Industries Inc. optimize its production lines. Data center suppliers are using Arda's software to make electrical equipment such as transformers.
"Manufacturing leaders told me their products change constantly, and manufacturing engineering can't keep pace," McGrew said. "Their designs change at software speed, but their factories don't. So, we built the technology platform that solves this problem."
In the long term, Arda plans to expand its focus to the consumer electronics market. The company hopes to facilitate the construction of factories that can make devices such as smartphones in a highly automated manner, according to the report.