Rebuilding the Way We Build

We can design new products faster than ever before, but manufacturing hasn’t advanced at the same rate.

Advances in software and AI are accelerating how quickly engineers can design, prototype, and iterate, but manufacturing remains the bottleneck. The factories building these products are remarkably inflexible. Every time a product changes, the production line has to change with it, which can take months.

This is one of the most overlooked problems in manufacturing. We’ve spent decades making factories more automated and efficient, but not necessarily more adaptable. Solving this problem will rebuild the way we build things.

Today, we welcome Arda (opens in new tab) out of stealth and are proud to announce that Felicis has invested in its Series A. For decades, America has underinvested in its industrial base, allowing critical manufacturing capabilities to move overseas. Arda makes it significantly easier to build the world’s most advanced physical products here at home. The company’s vision to turn product designs into adaptive assembly lines, and ultimately make robotics flexible enough to keep pace with innovation, will reshape what is possible across defense, data-center infrastructure, and consumer electronics.

The overlooked problem: factories can’t keep up with design

The common misconception is that manufacturing is static, but it’s not. Products are constantly being refined and improved, and every change to a design can ripple through the entire manufacturing process. A new component might require different assembly instructions, new tooling, or reprogramming the machines responsible for putting it together.

Consider how quickly products evolve. A drone needs to adapt to an evolving threat (opens in new tab). Data center racks need to be redesigned to accommodate new cooling technologies. Apple releases a new iPhone every year.

Programming a single station in a factory can take three to six months and cost close to $1 million. With a new phone staying at full-rate production for only about four months, an automated line may already need to be retooled by the time it’s ready.

Competition and demand are fierce in consumer technology. In defense and critical infrastructure, the stakes are even higher. The gap between the speed of innovation and the speed of manufacturing is holding us back from building what we need, when we need it.

Arda brings software speed to hardware production

This has been an opportunity we’ve believed in for a while, and Arda is making it a reality.

Arda starts with an AI agent that translates design files into assembly instructions ready for immediate deployment on factory floors. Anduril (opens in new tab), its first customer and design partner, has deployed the agent across every division. This is the first step in Arda’s three-part plan to bring manufacturing up to the speed of innovation:

1. Turn 3D CAD files into detailed assembly instructions. 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. More complex engineering workflows that previously took up to 30 hours now take roughly 2.5.

2. Turn those instructions into physical action. Arda has begun prototyping robotics that can assemble hardware products and adapt to new designs in minutes. Soon, production lines will be instantly adaptable to the updated designs.

3. Turn physical action into fully automated factories that can build anything domestically. Once design-to-assembly is fast and lines can adapt on their own, the economics that have kept advanced manufacturing offshore start to shift. Whoever can retool the quickest wins.

Arda is starting in defense, one of the highest-leverage, most strategically important areas of manufacturing. From there, it will scale into data center supply chains and consumer electronics.

A team built for the opportunity

Founder and CEO Bob McGrew and Peter worked together at OpenAI. Peter has seen how Bob leads; he is one of the rare leaders with the technical depth, commercial instinct, and drive to take on a problem of this scale. This founding team brings firsthand experience from OpenAI, Palantir, Adept, and Tesla to the manufacturing problem. It's basically like assembling The Avengers to build the industrial capacity America will need for the decades ahead.

For decades, we’ve accepted that manufacturing moves more slowly than innovation. Arda is building a future where that no longer has to be true.