LOS ANGELES, March 05, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Nominal, the connected testing and operations platform for hardware engineering teams, today announced an $80 million Series B-2 Acceleration Round led by Founders Fund, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and Red Glass. The round values Nominal at $1 billion.
Tools for Progress
Tech used to mean turbines, not apps. Platforms meant infrastructure, not engagement funnels. Performance mattered more than marketing. Nominal is built for that kind of work. The engineers using Nominal are building aircraft, satellites, autonomous vehicles, fusion energy systems, and advanced weapons programs — systems where failure is measured in real-world consequences. The tools they rely on should reflect that gravity.
Nominal co-founder and CEO Cameron McCord says he wasn’t looking for additional funding when Founders Fund approached. The company had just closed its $75M Series B led by Sequoia 10 months earlier. “We weren’t raising, but Trae Stephens at Founders Fund came to us with an offer for the resources to accelerate our progress. When Founders Fund tells you they see every product in the category and they’re choosing you, you listen.”
Stephens, a Founders Fund partner and co-founder at Anduril, said “the decision to lead the round was driven by direct feedback from founders and engineering teams across Founders Fund’s portfolio, including Anduril. Founders rarely agree on tooling, so when multiple portfolio companies and our entire engineering team at Anduril independently told us Nominal had become essential infrastructure, the decision was obvious. This is software built for programs where getting it right actually matters.”
Built for a New Era of Ambition
We’re in the middle of an industrial renaissance driven by physical AI, reshored manufacturing, and defense tech that demands both speed and reliability. Autonomous vehicles are entering production. Fusion plants are firing plasma. Hypersonic programs are accelerating. Manufacturing is reshoring. Defense programs are scaling under real urgency. And yet, the engineers building these systems are still too often constrained by tools designed for another era. Nominal was built to change that.
Nominal provides a unified platform that connects the entire hardware data supply chain — from instrumentation and data acquisition through analysis, reporting, and operational decisions. Its customers include teams building satellites, aircraft, autonomous and performance vehicles, energy infrastructure, and advanced defense systems — programs where reliability, speed, and operational clarity are critical.
The company’s growth has accelerated rapidly. Nominal grew revenue 7x year-over-year, serves thousands of engineers daily, and expanded its workforce from 43 to 135 employees across Austin, New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and London.
Nominal now supports more than 60 customers running mission-critical hardware programs worldwide. In 2025, the company expanded its platform with real-time operational workflows in Nominal Core and launched Nominal Connect, enabling automation and integration across modern test environments.
“Engineers building complex systems shouldn’t have to work around their tools. Nominal removes that friction to give teams both speed and reliability,” said Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia and Nominal board member. “Cameron and the team understand what engineers actually need to build safely and quickly in today’s industrial renaissance.”
With the new funding, Nominal plans to serve customers across every category of hardware, accelerate product development, expand its global footprint, and pursue strategic acquisitions and new business lines across the hardware data ecosystem. The company recently opened a London office to meet growing European demand and has become core infrastructure for the defense industrial base, with four out of five of the world’s largest defense contractors now running on Nominal.
“We’re not building a point solution. Nominal is building the next great industrial software company,” McCord said. “We’re building the tools modern hardware companies will run on for the next fifty years. That means earning trust, compounding reliability, and, often, becoming invisible through performance.”
About Nominal
Nominal is a technology partner to hardware engineering teams globally. Nominal modernizes the data supply chain for testing and operations across aerospace, defense, robotics, energy, and advanced manufacturing — helping hardware organizations operate at the speed of software development. The company is headquartered in Austin with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and London. Learn more at nominal.io
All Systems Nominal.
Media Contact:
press@nominal.io
