Why We’re Building Nominal in the UK and Europe

Engineering: Still Europe’s Strongest Export

Engineering, and in particular the engineering of physical systems, remains one of Europe’s strongest and most consistent exports. From aerospace to automotive, from nuclear power to industrial automation, European and British engineering have long set global standards for safety, quality, and resilience.

Aerospace and automotive companies are retooling around autonomy, electrification, and data. Nuclear and energy programs are growing again. Defence investment has accelerated since the war in Ukraine. In every one of those sectors, testing and evaluation (T&E), verification and validation (V&V), and robust certification have become even more central to progress.

Nominal’s work intersects with these disciplines directly. Our focus is on helping engineers run reliable tests, capture data consistently, and maintain traceability as systems become more complex.

London gives us proximity to the engineering and policy environments our users operate in.

We opened our London office quietly. There was no launch, no announcement. The work comes first.

Nominal believes engineers want to use tools built by engineers. That’s why we don’t open sales outposts. We build where engineers build. About 70% of our team are engineers, and the same principle applies to how our customers operate.

London matters for practical reasons:

• Our development model is distributed by default. Engineers in London, New York, Austin, and Los Angeles build the same product, work from the same repositories, and ship features together. This reduces single-region bottlenecks and mirrors how our customers operate across test sites, labs, and operational environments.
• Being close to European engineering programs adds context that directly informs product decisions. Certification requirements, deployment constraints, and data-handling expectations are shaped by regional policy and standards bodies. Working within that environment helps us design workflows that align with how engineers document tests, structure evidence, and manage long-lived systems.
• Our mission operations and implementation teams work hands-on with customer programs. As UK and European teams scale their test and data operations, our presence allows us to match their timelines, constraints, and operating rhythms directly.
• For software that supports physical systems, distance from the engineering environment slows everything down. Proximity shortens iteration cycles, reduces misalignment, and makes it easier to design tools based on actual operator needs.

This approach strengthens our ability to support deployments across sovereign, air-gapped, and constrained networks; to handle high-rate telemetry in real time; and to ensure test-record and assurance workflows meet the requirements of local regulators and certification authorities.

European engineering practice shapes the requirements for connected test systems.

Our European customers place strong emphasis on verification, uncertainty quantification, long-term reliability, and alignment with requirements - whether from regulation, or market demand. This framework shapes how large and complex systems reach production.

We see several areas where these practices align with our work underway across the UK and EU:

• Verifying systems, simulations and models before and during physical (and virtual) testing
• Managing decades-long asset histories across energy and industrial fleets
• Maintaining traceability for safety cases and certification artefacts
• Operating in environments with limited, sovereign, or hardened networks
• Supporting real-time decision cycles with low-latency, high-frequency sensor data
• Validating autonomy stacks across simulation, HIL, and live test environments

These conditions define the engineering environment. They also define the constraints and capabilities that connected test systems must support. Our goal is to meet those requirements directly rather than adapting them to a generic model.

Building in London strengthens our ability to support UK and European programs.

Scaling software for physical systems requires direct connection to the environments where those systems are designed, tested, and operated. The UK and Europe host some of the world’s most demanding examples of this work.

By building in London, we gain the context, proximity, and operating cadence needed to support these programs effectively.

Join Us

Nominal is growing in London.

We’re building a team of engineers who love working close to hardware, solving for scale, and helping the world’s most ambitious programs move faster with confidence.

If this describes you, reach out to the team.