Hardware engineers built the electric grid, put humans on the moon and connected continents with airplanes. They designed the world we live in. 

The hardware manufacturing that enabled those innovations followed a linear process: build a prototype -> test it -> validate it -> move to large-scale production. This process assumed long timelines, rigid production cycles and minimal testing after deployment. It worked in an era when hardware products were shipped every decade, not every year. 

But we are entering a new age of hardware. Reindustrialization, rising defense spending, global competition and the pace set by companies like SpaceX are putting pressure on hardware teams to move fast. Today’s hardware engineers need to continuously test, build and improve their systems, not just once, but throughout the entire development and operations.

This approach of continuous building and testing is not a new concept. It happened in software engineering and defined the cloud era. But, it has mainly remained unachievable in hardware, as we simply didn’t have a modern, purpose-built technology stack for it. Instead, hardware engineers were relying on workarounds, often involving a patchwork of solutions not built for hardware telemetry, and strung together with custom code or working with incumbent hardware testing systems from the 1980s, intended for traditional hardware companies that ship new products every 10 years, not every 10 weeks. 

Nominal’s three co-founders, Cameron McCord, Jason Hoch and Bryce Strauss, saw these pain points firsthand from their experiences at the U.S. Navy, Lockheed Martin and with Palantir’s customers. They founded Nominal to finally solve this and enable hardware engineers to continuously test and build physical products in the same way software engineers continuously test and build digital products.

Nominal is building a multi-product platform. There are currently two publicly available products, with additional announcements to follow.

• Nominal Core was the first product. It enables engineering teams to manage, monitor, and analyze hardware telemetry data in a single, collaborative environment, from testing to production and operations.
• Nominal Connect is the second product launched earlier this year. It’s a solution to build hardware-in-the-loop test applications for automation and edge processing.

These software-for-hardware products are already transforming how hardware engineers design and build their products. Nominal’s current customers range from modern hardware startups and scale-ups to very large enterprises, from defense/aerospace to energy and transportation, from the U.S. to Europe, and from the DoD to commercial customers. 

These successes, among others, are just the beginning, and we are excited to lead their Series B and be by their side in creating and defining this new software category that will power the next era of hardware.