Artificial intelligence-powered hardware-testing and engineering software startup Nominal Inc. today announced it raised $240 million in new funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Insight Partners.
The investment triples the company’s valuation to $3 billion, up from $1 billion cemented in March after it raised $80 million in a Series B-2 funding round. Additional major investors in the Series C round included Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Avenir, Salesforce Ventures, M13 and Lockheed Martin Ventures.
Nominal assists engineers with hardware development by supporting testing and development. Engineers must piece together data from disconnected testing systems to understand how a machine performed under realistic conditions and understand what needs fixing. The platform brings that information together, automates testing, and uses AI to help analyze the results. This shortens the cycle between testing and design, enabling faster improvements and iterations.
The challenge in the field isn’t collecting more data; there are plenty of ways to get that from simulation, sensors, video, and more. Hardware tests generate streams of sensor readings, logs, video and simulation results that all need to be analyzed together to create a whole picture of what happened. The company’s AI agent, Nominal Analyst, investigates that data and performs analysis based on the underlying evidence.
“Hardware engineering is getting its AI moment, with real operational value that goes far beyond making existing workflows faster,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Cameron McCord. “The companies building the world’s most advanced machines have decades of hard-won knowledge in their organizations.”
The company said it built its AI Intelligence Platform to bring together all the systems needed for testing and design assistance. It has multiple layers, including connections to engineering applications, the agent infrastructure, the data and finally the physical world through sensors.
Examples of what Nominal’s AI product works with alongside engineers include aircraft, rocket engines, autonomous vehicles, drones and energy systems. Engineering data and documentation associated with the hardware fed to the agents help during the development process to investigate performance, compare tests and check results against requirements.
The company said the challenge is putting engineers’ knowledge to work and connecting it to data so engineers can take on harder problems than wiring up tests. The objective is to let them sit down, smooth out challenges and address what looked impossible before.
“Engineers stay in command, with purpose-built AI helping them do their best work,” added McCord.
Nominal works with the tools engineers already bring, including application programming interfaces, Model Context Protocol and SQL for database queries. Developers can also directly access the platform to connect tools, build custom applications, and create their own workflows and agents.
The company said more than 80 commercial and government organizations use its platform, including five of the seven biggest defense contractors. Nominal’s customers include defense technology company Anduril Industries Inc., military shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc., known as HII, and high-speed aircraft developer Hermeus Corp.
Image: Nominal
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