The data platform for hardware engineering teams
HQ: Los Angeles, CA, United States (offices in Austin, New York, Washington DC and London) | Founded: 2022 | Employees: About 135 (more than tripled in the ten months to March 2026) | Stage: Series B extension — $80M at a $1B valuation led by Founders Fund (March 2026); about $182M raised in total | Website: https://nominal.io
Nominal makes software for the engineers who build and test physical systems. Rockets, satellites, fighter jets, submarines, nuclear reactors and power plants all generate enormous amounts of data during development and operation — sensor readings, thermal vacuum tests, acceptance tests, anomaly investigations. Nominal captures that data, structures it, makes it searchable and keeps it permanently, replacing a patchwork of legacy tools, spreadsheets and scripts.
The company was founded in 2022 by Cameron McCord, Jason Hoch and Bryce Strauss, three MIT alumni who had lived the problem in their own careers. Their insight was that hardware teams were underserved by software: the tools available were either incremental updates to decades-old systems or lightweight dashboards borrowed from the software world, not real infrastructure built for the weight of testing critical machines.
Nominal's platform, built around Nominal Core and Nominal Connect, is a collaborative workspace for engineering data. Teams run tests, stream data in real time, analyse results, document decisions and share findings. Because everything is structured and retained, it becomes a durable record of engineering judgement — and, as the company argues, the foundation that makes AI genuinely useful in hardware rather than a gimmick.
The business has grown quickly alongside rising defense and industrial investment. Nominal started in aerospace and defense because that is where its founders had experience, and is now expanding into automotive, energy, manufacturing, robotics and other industries where engineers test and operate physical systems. The company has also signalled that acquisitions will be part of its expansion, particularly in Europe.
Nominal is selling into a corner of software that has barely changed in decades. Engineers testing rockets, satellites, fighter jets and power plants still wrestle with fragmented tools — one system to capture data, spreadsheets and MATLAB scripts to analyse it, and email to share conclusions. Nominal replaces that with a single platform where test data is captured, structured, searchable and permanent. That sounds unglamorous, and it is exactly why it works.
The company's timing is not accidental. Defense and hardware spending is rising sharply, and four of the five largest defense contractors now run on Nominal, along with more than sixty organisations overall. Revenue grew about 7x in the ten months after its June 2025 Series B, and the team more than tripled to 135 people. Founders Fund led an $80M extension at a $1B valuation in March 2026, with Sequoia, General Catalyst, Lux and Lightspeed backing it.
What makes Nominal defensible is that it becomes the system of record for engineering judgement. When years of test results, anomalies and decisions are structured in one place, they compound — and that becomes the dataset an AI can actually use. The founders argue the same AI moment that reshaped software is about to reshape hardware, and that whoever owns the engineering data supply chain benefits.
The main risks are the usual ones for enterprise infrastructure: long sales cycles into cautious, security-conscious customers, a market that expands one program at a time, and competition from incumbents and in-house tooling. But the very thing that makes defense and aerospace slow — caution about critical systems — also makes a trusted platform that already runs on those programs very hard to displace.
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