We raised $80M to make hardware teams AI-ready

Today, we're announcing that Nominal raised an additional $80 million at a valuation of $1 billion. Founders Fund led the round, with continued support from Sequoia, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Red Glass, and Lightspeed. It is the largest vote of confidence we've received, and we take it seriously.

This letter is for the customers and engineers who made it possible — an update on what we're seeing in the world, what we believe it means, and what we intend to do about it.

Every day, somewhere in the world, a Nominal customer is doing something extraordinary. Firing a rocket engine and watching the data stream in real time. Qualifying a satellite in a thermal vacuum chamber. Running acceptance tests on hardware that will end up in a submarine, or a fighter jet, or a power plant. These are not casual endeavors. These are the programs the world counts on.

Nominal exists to help these engineering teams rethink their data supply chain: the end-to-end flow from instrumentation through acquisition, storage, analysis, reporting, and into the decisions that shape the next design. We capture the data. We structure it. We make it searchable, governable, and permanent. We automate the workflows around it. When years of engineering judgment are structured and compounding, AI becomes genuinely useful. Not as yet another "digital engineering" gimmick, but as a tool that earns its place by being right.

The last 10 months since our Series B fundraise have been a period of extraordinary growth. Four of the five largest defense contractors in the world now run on Nominal. More than sixty organizations trust us with their most sensitive programs. Our revenue has grown 7x and our team has more than tripled to 135 people across Austin, New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and London. Growth like this comes from trust — engineering teams adopting Nominal on one program and pulling it into the next one, and the next one. That's what infrastructure looks like. It spreads because it works.

With this funding, we are going to deepen our commitment to global hardware teams in three ways.

1. First, we are going to keep building, faster. Nominal Core and Nominal Connect are the foundation. We will continue making the tools we build faster, more reliable, and more intelligent with every iteration. The rich data catalogs our customers are building inside Nominal, the engineering judgment captured through years of analysis, the expanding use of Connect across testbeds and field operations: all of this compounds in the age of AI. We intend to ensure it compounds faster.
2. Second, we are going to expand. The great industrial software companies of the past were built through deep customer trust, disciplined expansion, and strategic acquisitions. We believe the fastest path to making our customers' data supply chains AI-ready is through pairing organic growth with strategically acquiring companies with extraordinary technology and teams — in the United States and across Europe — where the combination produces something far greater than either could alone. We have already started down this path, and this capital accelerates the zone of possible.
3. Third, we are going to take Nominal to every category of serious hardware. We started in aerospace and defense because we lived the day-to-day pain firsthand in our own careers. Since then, we've had the fortune of working alongside thousands of engineers across the global industrial sector. The same data supply chain problems exist in automotive, energy, manufacturing, robotics, and every industry where engineers test and operate physical systems. Ambition is timeless. The tools have not kept up. We intend to close that gap and give engineering teams trusted Tools for Progress.

When we started Nominal, we believed that the engineers building the future deserved better software. Not incremental improvements on legacy tools. Not lightweight dashboards borrowed from the software world. Real infrastructure, built for the weight of serious work. That belief has only gotten stronger.

We are building the platforms that modern hardware companies will run on for the next fifty years. Thank you for trusting us with your most important work. We will not let you down.

Cameron, Bryce, Jason, and the Nomineers