Nominal raises $240M at a $3B valuation to build the intelligence platform for hardware engineering

Nominal, the Hardware Intelligence Platform, today announced a $240 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by Insight Partners. Other major investors include Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Avenir, Salesforce Ventures, M13, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, PSP Growth, and Deployment Capital.

Bringing hardware engineering into the intelligence era

The next generation of machines will be built by engineers working with increasingly powerful intelligence. They're designing aircraft that fly farther, robots that shape the physical world, energy systems that generate and store power more efficiently, and factories that adapt and scale for any demand.

As reindustrialisation, reshoring, and physical AI reshape the global economy, the stakes for the teams building aircraft, satellites, autonomous systems, nuclear reactors, smart factories, and other complex machines are rising. Yet the software supporting these teams has not kept pace with their ambitions. Engineering data remains fragmented across legacy systems and disconnected tools, while critical knowledge often lives in individual engineers' experience. Without the conditions and historical decisions that give data meaning, engineers struggle to build on previous work, and AI systems lack the foundation they need to contribute reliably to high-consequence engineering.

Nominal is an intelligence platform built for this work. It connects hardware data with the engineering context behind it, giving engineers the tools to understand complex systems, investigate problems, and make better-informed decisions. AI agents can work from that same foundation, helping teams analyse more information, surface relevant knowledge, and accelerate work that once required hours of manual investigation. As that knowledge accumulates, teams move faster through every stage of development and build on a centralised record that informs new product lines and improves the products already in the field.

"Hardware engineering is getting its AI moment, with real operational value that goes far beyond making existing workflows faster," said Cameron McCord, Nominal co-founder and CEO. "The companies building the world's most advanced machines have decades of hard-won knowledge in their organisations. We're building the platform that puts that knowledge to work, connecting it to data, so engineers can take on harder problems and build things that weren't possible before. Engineers stay in command, with purpose-built AI helping them do their best work."

Nominal supports the environments where hardware is developed and validated, from cloud deployments to on-premises infrastructure, air-gapped environments, and edge devices. Nominal Analyst, the company's first AI agent, investigates engineering data and runs complex analyses, with answers traceable to the underlying evidence. Engineers retain control over the decisions, reviews, and approvals that matter.

Nominal is designed to work with the tools and systems engineering teams already rely on. Through SQL, APIs, and MCP, Nominal for Developers gives engineers direct access to the platform, allowing them to connect existing tools, build custom applications, and create their own workflows and agents on top of Nominal.

Built for the world's most demanding engineering teams

More than 80 commercial and government organisations use Nominal, including five of the seven largest defence contractors. Across these organisations, Nominal helps engineering teams shorten the feedback loops between building, testing, and improving complex systems, so they can move programmes forward faster and bring new capabilities into the world.

At Anduril Industries, more than 300 engineers rely on Nominal across programmes. Analysis that once took five to six hours now happens in near real time, giving engineers across the organisation faster access to the data and insights they need to iterate. At HII, Nominal reduced certain analysis tasks from hours to minutes and cut some production test steps by approximately half, helping accelerate the path from testing to delivery. Hermeus reduced the time between uploading data and reviewing it by 80% while designing and building its Quarterhorse Mk 1 aircraft in seven months.

"Nominal has become an essential part of how some of the most ambitious engineering teams build and validate hardware. The company earned that position by understanding the realities of hardware engineering and building software engineers use every day," said Guru Chahal and Sebastian Duesterhoeft, partners at Lightspeed. "As AI creates new possibilities across the physical world, we believe Nominal is uniquely positioned to help these teams adopt it where the stakes are highest. We're proud to deepen our partnership with the Nominal team as they build the platform for the next era of hardware engineering."

"General-purpose AI models are becoming widely available, but they don't carry an industry's proprietary data, workflows, and institutional knowledge. Lasting value comes from platforms that connect AI to that context and help organisations own and build on it," said Crissy Costa Behrens, Managing Director at Insight Partners. "In hardware engineering, where the work is high-stakes and critical knowledge has historically been hard to capture, Nominal gives teams a way to turn that expertise into a durable advantage. We're excited to partner with Cameron, Jason, Bryce, and the entire Nominal team in this next phase of growth."

The Air Force recently selected Nominal for a $71.2 million Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) to support Collaborative Combat Aircraft capability development. It's the latest step for a company that gained early traction in defence, where engineering rigour and security requirements are exceptionally high. A modern aircraft programme can involve primes, suppliers, and government test teams, yet critical evidence may still move between them through zip files and email threads. Nominal gives teams a shared workspace to exchange test evidence against requirements while preserving each organisation's control over its intellectual property.

What's next

The funding will support deeper products for engineers and engineering enterprises. Nominal is developing agents and applications for work across a machine's lifecycle, from requirements verification and planning to scheduling and fleet health. The company will also expand into new industries and regions, including through strategic acquisitions. This year, Nominal acquired Fid Labs, whose team is developing Nominal's agents, and Pull Systems, extending the platform into automotive.

"Over the next five years, companies that effectively bring AI into their engineering workflows will have a real competitive advantage," said McCord. "They'll be able to be more ambitious: more product lines, more configurations, and more performance from their assets in the field. We're building Nominal to help their engineers accelerate with confidence."