Nominal Acquires Fid Labs to Bring Domain-Expert AI to Hardware Engineering

When people ask me how AI is changing hardware engineering, my honest answer is: it mostly isn't. Not yet.

Most hardware organizations can't find their test data, let alone run AI on it. Data lives in proprietary formats, on local drives, in PDFs, in Excel sheets that one person knows how to read. That's the problem Nominal was built to solve: the hardware data supply chain. A single platform where engineering teams capture, store, analyze, and collaborate on time-series data with the same fluidity software teams take for granted.

We've spent years building that foundation. Now comes the part that makes it exponential.

Nominal is acquiring Fid Labs. Adam Wolnikowski, Fid Labs founder, joins us as AI Product Lead.

Why this acquisition, specifically

Adam built Fid Labs to connect AI agents directly to dev environments, simulators, and physical hardware. Sensor hookups, spec sheet searches, error triage, integration code: the integration work that eats hours every week and demands deep domain knowledge to get right. He automated it. He sold it to real robotics teams running real hardware. And he learned something that most AI companies haven't: where AI earns trust with engineers and where it doesn't.

That distinction matters. Most AI companies start with a foundation model and go looking for problems. Adam started from the engineering workflow. He watched robotics teams lose days to integration busywork and built agents to eliminate it. When I sat down with him for the first time, within twenty minutes he was describing the exact pattern our customers describe to us: teams drowning in data they've already collected, senior engineers stretched too thin, and junior engineers with all the talent in the world but years away from the pattern recognition that makes analysis fast.

He had been building toward our thesis from a different starting point. The pieces fit.

What this means for the hardware data supply chain

When we raised our Series B-2 in March, we said we would pursue strategic acquisitions in the hardware data supply chain. Fid Labs is the first.

The thesis: the hardware data supply chain needs to be integrated end-to-end. Nominal Connect captures data at the edge, from instruments and hardware in real time. Nominal Core stores, visualizes, and enables collaboration on that data in the cloud. The missing layer is intelligence: AI that can reason across test history, cross-reference anomalies in context, spot the trend a human would need three days and a lucky hunch to find.

That layer only works if it understands the domain. A propulsion engineer reviewing post-fire data needs AI that knows what a nominal combustion profile looks like and what deviation matters. A race engineer between qualifying and the race needs AI that can cross-reference telemetry anomalies across every session that weekend without pulling data from three different systems. The AI has to understand the hardware, the data formats, and the engineering intent behind the question being asked.

Fid Labs brings deep experience in exactly this: AI agents built for hardware-native workflows, agent orchestration on top of real engineering tools, and a founder who has spent years earning trust with the engineers who will use the product.

What Adam will build

Adam's mandate is broad. AI strategy, AI roadmap, and the team to execute it. His first product ships soon: an AI Analyst that lives inside Nominal Core and performs the kind of deep, contextual analysis across complex datasets that currently requires a senior engineer and half a day.

The ambition goes well beyond a single product. We are building AI that works alongside engineers across the engineering workflow: analysis, monitoring, integration, documentation, collaboration. Domain-expert AI that understands the hardware, the data, and the intent behind every engineering decision.

Our customers are building reusable rockets, autonomous aircraft, fusion reactors, and advanced defense systems. The companies working on the hardest problems in the physical world are bottlenecked on software infrastructure. Not on physics. Not on talent. On tooling.

We intend to solve that. Fid Labs joining Nominal accelerates us and accelerates our customers.

Onwards.