- Nominal has raised $240 million in Series C funding at a $3 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
- The valuation is three times the $1 billion set in March.
- More than 80 commercial and government organisations use the platform, including five of the seven largest defence contractors.
Building aircraft, satellites, robots and energy systems takes more than powerful AI models. Engineers need reliable data, the context behind it and evidence they can trust.
Nominal, an Austin-based hardware intelligence platform, has raised $240 million in Series C funding at a $3 billion valuation to bring that intelligence into high-stakes engineering work.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round and Insight Partners co-led. Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Avenir, Salesforce Ventures, M13, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, PSP Growth and Deployment Capital also took part.
Bringing hardware engineering into the intelligence era
As reindustrialisation, reshoring and physical AI reshape industries, engineering teams are building ever more complex machines. Its data often sits scattered across legacy systems, disconnected tools and individual engineers’ memory.
Nominal connects hardware data with the engineering context behind it. Teams can investigate problems, analyse results and make decisions from one source, and its AI agents work from the same data while engineers stay in control.
“Hardware engineering is getting its AI moment, with real operational value that goes far beyond making existing workflows faster. The companies building the world’s most advanced machines have decades of hard-won knowledge in their data. We’re building the platform that puts that knowledge to work, so engineers can take on harder problems and build things that weren’t possible before,” said Cameron McCord, Nominal’s co-founder and CEO.
Its first AI agent, Nominal Analyst, investigates engineering data and runs complex analyses, with answers traceable to the underlying evidence.
The platform runs in the cloud, on customers’ own servers, in air-gapped setups with no internet connection, and at the edge. Developers can plug in existing tools through SQL, application programming interfaces (APIs) and the Model Context Protocol, a standard for connecting AI to software.
From early funding to a $3B valuation
Founded in 2022 by Cameron McCord, Bryce Strauss and Jason Hoch, who have worked across the Navy, defence and enterprise software, Nominal is led by McCord, a former US Navy submarine officer and Anduril alumnus.
TFN covered Nominal’s $80 million round in March 2026, which valued it at $1 billion and was led by Founders Fund. That came after a $75 million Series B led by Sequoia. The jump to $3 billion comes as the company moves beyond defence into automotive, robotics and energy.
Engineering teams put the platform to work
At Anduril, more than 300 engineers use the platform, and analysis that once took five to six hours now runs in near real time.
Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens co-founded Anduril, so one of Nominal’s investors is also tied to one of its biggest customers. HII has cut some analysis tasks from hours to minutes. Hermeus cut the time between uploading data and reviewing it by 80% while building its Quarterhorse Mk 1 aircraft in seven months.
In October the US Air Force picked Nominal for a $71.2 million Strategic Funding Increase to support Collaborative Combat Aircraft work.
“Nominal has become an essential part of how some of the most ambitious engineering teams build and validate hardware,” said Guru Chahal and Sebastian Duesterhoeft, partners at Lightspeed.
Crissy Costa Behrens, a managing director at Insight Partners, added, “Lasting value comes from platforms that connect AI to that context and help organizations own and build on it.”
The money will go into deeper products for engineers, with AI agents and applications covering a machine’s life from requirements checks and planning to scheduling and fleet health. Nominal also plans to grow into new industries and regions, partly by acquisition. It has bought Fid Labs, whose team builds its agents, and Pull Systems, which extends it into automotive.
“Over the next five years, companies that effectively bring AI into their engineering workflows will have a real competitive advantage,” McCord concluded .
Nominal has not disclosed revenue, headcount or total funding raised. As AI moves from software into the physical world, will engineers trust it with machines that cannot afford a mistake?
