Nominal Selected $71.2M to Advance Air Force and Navy Air Dominance Capabilities

LOS ANGELES, CA — October 26, 2026 — Nominal, the hardware intelligence platform that helps engineering teams test, manufacture, and operate complex systems, announced today that it has been selected for a Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI)—a competitive AFWERX program that matches government investment against dual-use technology a program office has already committed to buy. The package totals $71.2M, including $30M of private matching and $41.2M of Government funding across the Air Force and Navy programs. Programs include work across the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, AFWERX, Air Force Test Pilot School, and the Navy Program Executive Office for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons (PEO(U&W)).

Why CCA Matters

Crewed fighters take a decade or more to field and cost hundreds of millions of dollars per airframe, but that timeline and cost no longer match the pace of demand. CCA is the Air Force's answer: uncrewed aircraft that fly alongside crewed fighters, extending how far those fighters can reach, how well they can survive, and how much they can accomplish in contested airspace. Fielding that capability faster raises the cost for any adversary willing to test U.S. airpower, creating deterrence built on speed. CCA has already moved from prototype to production faster than any fighter aircraft program in decades, with production contracts awarded months ahead of schedule earlier this year.

What This Funds

One of the byproducts of moving this fast is that CCA generates enormous volumes of data across developmental and operational testing and multiple vendors, which has to be captured, standardized, and turned into a decision someone can trust. It must be fast enough to keep pace with developmental flight test, experimental operations, operational test, tactics development, and fielding all happening at once. This selection funds Nominal's data and tech stack to support the capture, organization, and analysis of aircraft test and telemetry data generated during CCA development and flight test, while enabling seamless data sharing across the Air Force test enterprise.

Why This Is Mission Critical

Delivering a new capability like CCA requires building novel approaches to testing, tactics development, training, and fielding. With multiple vendors developing competing aircraft, autonomy solutions, and overlapping test-to-fielding schedules, CCA’s underlying data infrastructure must scale across all fronts simultaneously. Getting these wrong would cost time that the warfighter does not have. Getting it right rapidly is the baseline requirement.

Nominal is already helping over 60 organizations across industry build and iterate their systems rapidly. In the last year, they announced partnerships with Anduril (opens in new tab) and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc (opens in new tab). This STRATFI further accelerates those iteration cycles by streamlining analysis and data sharing across vendors and Government, and by giving Government teams the same modernized solutions available in industry.

"Every engineer building next-gen aircraft like CCA today is being asked to build the next evolution of airpower from the ground up, and that means a higher bar than ever. The data platform and tooling underneath them has to meet that same bar," said Cameron McCord, CEO and Co-Founder of Nominal. "STRATFI will provide the critical funding needed for Nominal to do that work on the program moving faster than any fighter program in the last half century."

“This investment shows how AFWERX uses the Strategic Funding Increase program to bring together Department of the Air Force funding, operational demand and private capital around technologies with a clear path to operational use,” said Tiffany Robinson, AFWERX growth stage investment lead. “By supporting work relevant to CCA, we are advancing a Department of the Air Force priority and strengthening the industrial base needed to meet future mission demands.”

Built on What Came Before

Nominal already performs this work across some of the most demanding test environments in the country:

DARPA CyPhER Forge: Nominal was selected as the data backbone for one of DARPA's flagship next-generation programs.
Air Force Test Pilot School: Nominal automated flight test data analysis tool for student curriculum flights and fleet health monitoring of aircraft test data acquisition systems.
Experimental Platform for Intelligent Combat (EPIC): Nominal supported the Navy’s EPIC Phase I autonomy demonstration by ingesting, normalizing, and time-synchronizing flight telemetry, autonomy logs, and mission data into a common mission record, enabling government teams to reconstruct missions, apply performance measures, and assess autonomy behavior across test events.

Nominal spent the last several years helping test pilots and engineers build confidence in next-generation aircraft before they were ever fielded, from the Test Pilot School (opens in new tab) to DARPA's most demanding programs (opens in new tab) to Navy pathfinder efforts like EPIC. STRATFI extends that same work to CCA, at a scale and pace the Department of War requires.

"Our partners choose to work with Nominal because our data infrastructure lets them turn complex test data into insight, and trust in that capability has carried us to this moment," said Jenn Wilson, Head of Federal at Nominal. "STRATFI signals the Air Force is prioritizing the data and test tooling needed to keep pace with how fast modern programs are moving, and we intend to keep earning that trust on the CCA program."

What Comes Next

Nobody tests more hardware than the Department of War. A single flagship program choosing Nominal at this scale would already be significant. Three organizations in four months is a clear signal the Department of War is changing how it fields capabilities, across programs and services. The Air Force is moving CCA at a pace with no recent precedent, and this is the data infrastructure funded to keep up with it.

About Nominal

Nominal is the AI-ready engineering data platform that helps aerospace, energy, defense, automotive, and other industrial hardware teams ship breakthrough products faster. Thousands of engineers use Nominal’s platform to confidently operate complex physical systems, while accelerating and automating verification loops from prototype to fleet sustainment. For more information, visit nominal.io (opens in new tab).

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