Nominal, which sells what it calls a "Hardware Intelligence Platform," has raised a $240 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, and Insight Partners co-led. Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Salesforce Ventures and Lockheed Martin Ventures are among the other investors.
The platform connects hardware data with the engineering context behind it, including test conditions and past design decisions. Nominal Analyst, the company's first AI agent, investigates engineering data and runs analyses, with answers traceable to the underlying evidence. Nominal for Developers opens the platform through SQL, APIs and MCP, so teams can build their own applications and agents on top of it. Deployments run in the cloud, on-premises, in air-gapped environments or on edge devices.
Nominal says more than 80 commercial and government organizations use it. At Anduril Industries, more than 300 engineers work in the platform, and analysis that once took five to six hours now happens in near real time. At HII, certain analysis tasks dropped from hours to minutes, and some production test steps were cut by about half. Hermeus reduced the time between uploading data and reviewing it by 80 percent while designing and building its Quarterhorse Mk 1 aircraft in seven months.
For test and quality engineers, the HII result is the one closest to the production floor, since it concerns test steps rather than after-the-fact analysis.
The company got its start in defense. The Air Force recently selected Nominal for a $71.2 million Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) to support Collaborative Combat Aircraft capability development. Nominal's pitch there is a shared workspace where primes, suppliers and government test teams exchange test evidence against requirements, each keeping control of its own intellectual property. Today, the company says, that evidence often moves between them as zip files and email threads.
The new money goes toward agents and applications for work across a machine's lifecycle, including requirements verification, planning, scheduling and fleet health. Nominal also plans to expand into new industries and regions, partly through acquisitions. This year it bought Fid Labs, whose team is developing Nominal's agents, and Pull Systems, which extends the platform into automotive.
