Nominal Triples Its Valuation to $3 Billion on a $240 Million Round as Defense Contractors Buy Its Testing Software

Nominal, a startup building the software layer for hardware development, has raised $240 million in Series C funding at a $3 billion valuation — triple what the company was worth in a round earlier this year, Bloomberg reported. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the financing, with Insight Partners co-leading. Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Salesforce Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures and PSP Growth were among the participants.

The company sells what it calls a Hardware Intelligence Platform: software that connects test equipment, pulls together engineering data scattered across instruments and simulations, and gives AI systems the context to investigate results rather than just generate answers. At the center is Nominal Analyst, an AI agent that inspects hardware test data and produces conclusions with traceable evidence — a design choice aimed at engineers who must defend every result. The platform runs in the cloud, on-premises, air-gapped, and at the edge.

The commercial traction is concentrated where testing matters most: defense and aerospace. Nominal says revenue has more than tripled since the start of 2026, a company-reported figure it attributes largely to the boom in defense technology spending. More than 80 commercial and government organizations now use the software, including five of the seven largest defense contractors.

The customer examples are specific. Nominal says more than 300 engineers at Anduril Industries use the platform to shorten analysis tasks that previously took five to six hours to near real time. Shipbuilder HII says it cut some production testing steps roughly in half. Aerospace startup Hermeus reduced the time between uploading and reviewing data by 80 percent while designing and building its Quarterhorse Mk 1 aircraft over seven months — figures that come from the company's own announcement and have not been independently verified.

The US Air Force has also put money behind it: Nominal was recently selected for a $71.2 million Strategic Funding Increase contract supporting Collaborative Combat Aircraft development, where prime contractors and suppliers exchange verification data against program requirements while keeping each participant's intellectual property segregated.

Nominal started four years ago with a narrower problem — helping hardware teams work with test data — and has been expanding since. Earlier this year it acquired automotive software firm Pull Systems and agent developer Fid Labs. CEO Cameron McCord, a former US Navy officer, framed the raise in terms of institutional knowledge: "The companies building the world's most advanced machines have decades of hard-won knowledge in their data," he said. "We're building the platform that puts that knowledge to work."

The round is the latest evidence that the AI infrastructure boom is spreading from chips and data centers to industrial software. Investors including Dealroom analysts noted the signal: capital is rewarding the picks-and-shovels suppliers of the defense buildout — the testing, data and workflow layers — as much as the platforms that make headlines. Nominal says the new capital will fund agents that cover the full hardware lifecycle, from planning and requirements verification to fleet health tracking, plus international expansion and further acquisitions.