Nominal, an Austin startup building an AI platform for engineering and testing complex hardware, has raised $240 million in a Series C round at a $3 billion valuation. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with Insight Partners as co-lead, the company announced on November 9.
The round triples Nominal’s valuation in eight months. In March, the company raised a $155 million Series B extension at a $1 billion valuation, led by Trae Stephens at Founders Fund in a deal described as preemptive, meaning the offer came from the investor rather than from a fundraising process started by the startup.
A valuation tripled in eight months
The new round drew in a long list of existing backers alongside the two leads. Participants included Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Avenir, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, M13, DE Shaw Ventures and Deployment Capital.
Nominal said its revenue has more than tripled since the beginning of 2026. The company now counts more than 80 commercial and government organisations as customers, including five of the seven largest defence contractors.
What Nominal does
Nominal describes itself as a hardware intelligence platform. It connects data from hardware tests with the engineering context behind that data, so engineers can understand complex systems, investigate problems and make better informed decisions.
AI agents work from the same foundation. Nominal Analyst, the company’s first AI agent, investigates engineering data and runs complex analyses, with answers traceable to the underlying evidence. Engineers keep control of the decisions, reviews and approvals that matter.
The platform is built for aerospace, defence, robotics, energy and advanced manufacturing. It runs in cloud deployments, on premises, in air-gapped environments and on edge devices, and it connects to the tools engineering teams already use through SQL, APIs and MCP.
“Hardware engineering is getting its AI moment, with real operational value that goes far beyond making existing workflows faster. The companies building the world’s most advanced machines have decades of hard-won knowledge in their data.”
Cameron McCord, co-founder and CEO of Nominal
Customers in defence and industry
At Anduril, more than 300 engineers rely on Nominal across programs. Analysis that once took five to six hours now happens in near real time, giving engineers faster access to the data they need to iterate.
At HII, a pilot with Nominal reduced certain analysis tasks from hours to minutes and cut some production test steps by about half. At Hermeus, the platform reduced the time between uploading data and reviewing it by 80 percent while the company designed and built its Quarterhorse Mk 1 aircraft in seven months.
Nominal also has federal backing. In October, the US Air Force selected the company for a $71.2 million Strategic Funding Increase to support Collaborative Combat Aircraft capabilities, a program that requires matching funds from outside the Air Force.
What the money is for
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 its agents, and Pull Systems, which extends the platform into automotive.
McCord said companies that bring AI into their engineering workflows effectively over the next five years will have a real competitive advantage. Nominal, founded in 2022 and headquartered in Austin, now has offices in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and London.
