Hardware-testing startup Nominal raises $240 million, triples valuation to $3 billion

Nominal Inc., an Austin-based startup that builds software for testing and analyzing hardware, said Monday it has raised $240 million in a Series C funding round that values the four-year-old company at $3 billion, tripling the valuation it held as recently as March. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by Insight Partners, according to a post on Nominal's company blog announcing the deal.

The raise is one of the largest in recent months for a company selling software rather than physical hardware into the defense and aerospace industries, and it underscores how quickly investors are pricing in demand for artificial intelligence tools built specifically for engineers who test rockets, aircraft, ships and autonomous vehicles rather than for office workers or consumers.

A fast climb in valuation

Nominal's new valuation is three times what it was worth eight months ago. The company raised $80 million in a Series B-2 round in March 2026 led by Founders Fund at a $1 billion valuation, which itself followed a $75 million Series B round in mid-2025 led by Sequoia Capital and a $20 million Series A round in 2024, according to the company.

The new round's roster of backers spans established venture firms and corporate investors with a stake in the outcome. Alongside Lightspeed and Insight Partners, Nominal's announcement of the round names Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Avenir, Salesforce Ventures, M13, DE Shaw Ventures, Carpenter Capital and Lockheed Martin Ventures, the defense contractor's strategic investment arm, among the participants.

Nominal says it now serves more than 80 commercial and government organizations, including five of the seven largest U.S. defense contractors, though the company did not name most of them. It did disclose three customers by name in its announcement: Anduril Industries, the drone and autonomous-weapons maker; Huntington Ingalls Industries, the shipbuilder; and Hermeus, the Atlanta-based hypersonic aircraft developer. The deal and the customer list were independently reported by SiliconANGLE, which matched the figures in the company's own announcement.

What the software actually does

Nominal's pitch is that hardware engineering generates enormous volumes of test data — telemetry from a rocket engine firing, sensor readings from a ship trial, flight logs from a drone — that is scattered across spreadsheets, proprietary formats and disconnected systems, making it slow for engineers to find answers when something goes wrong or a design needs validating. The company's platform is built in four layers, according to its own description: a "Connected Control" layer that links to physical test equipment, a data layer that standardizes engineering data, an "Intelligence Layer" that connects AI models to that data, and an applications layer where engineers build their own workflows using SQL, APIs and a protocol called MCP.

Its newest product, called Nominal Analyst, is described as the company's first purpose-built AI agent, meant to investigate engineering data, run analyses and trace its conclusions back to the underlying evidence rather than simply generating a plausible-sounding answer. In its announcement, Nominal said more than 300 engineers at Anduril now use the platform, cutting analyses that once took five to six hours down to near real time, and that a pilot at Huntington Ingalls cut certain analysis tasks from hours to minutes while reducing some production test steps by roughly half. Hermeus, the company said, used the platform while building its Quarterhorse Mk 1 test aircraft in seven months and cut the time between uploading data and reviewing it by 80%. Those figures come from Nominal's own account of its customers' results and have not been independently verified by outside auditors.

"Hardware engineering is getting its AI moment," Cameron McCord, Nominal's co-founder and chief executive, said in the company's funding announcement.

McCord, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer, co-founded Nominal in 2022. In the same announcement, he said engineers "stay in command, with purpose-built AI helping them do their best work" — a framing aimed at engineering teams wary of AI tools that obscure how a result was reached, a particular concern in industries such as aerospace and defense where a wrong answer can be catastrophic.

Investors point to a broader pattern

Guru Chahal and Sebastian Duesterhoeft, partners at Lightspeed, said in the announcement that Nominal "has become an essential part of how some of the most ambitious engineering teams build and validate hardware." Crissy Costa Behrens, a managing director at Insight Partners, said in the same post that lasting value in enterprise software comes from platforms that connect artificial intelligence to an industry's own proprietary data and institutional knowledge, rather than from generic AI layered on top of existing tools.

The round arrives amid a broader surge of venture money into companies that sell software and hardware to the U.S. defense and aerospace industrial base, a sector that has drawn comparisons to the cloud-computing buildout of the previous decade as the Pentagon pushes to field autonomous systems faster. Nominal said the Air Force selected it this year for a $71.2 million Strategic Funding Increase award tied to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, a figure the company disclosed itself and that could not be independently confirmed against a public Air Force contract notice by publication time.

What comes next

Nominal said the new capital will fund the build-out of additional AI agents and applications spanning a machine's entire lifecycle — from early requirements and scheduling to in-service fleet health — along with expansion into new industries and geographies and further acquisitions. The company has already made two purchases this year: Fid Labs, whose team is now building Nominal's AI agents, and Pull Systems, which the company said extends its platform into the automotive industry, broadening it beyond its roots in aerospace and defense.

Nominal is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with additional offices in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Washington and London, according to the company. Whether its valuation holds up will depend on whether the surge of defense and industrial software investment that has lifted companies such as Anduril and Palantir over the past several years continues at the same pace, or whether some of that enthusiasm cools as more competitors enter the market for engineering and test data software.