Summary
Hardware teams have adopted software’s iteration speed without the data infrastructure to match it. The gap shows first in testing, where it has become the bottleneck on building drones, satellites, ships, reactors, and more — but the gap runs through production and field deployments too. Nominal closes it: a hardware intelligence platform where engineers capture, understand, and act on hardware data, preserve engineering context, and carry that intelligence from the first bench test to systems operating in the field. Salesforce Ventures is proud to participate in Nominal’s Series C.
- Founders: Cameron McCord, Bryce Strauss, and Jason Hoch
- Sectors: Defense Tech, Industrial AI
- Location: Los Angeles, California
The Opportunity
Every hardware engineer knows the process of painstakingly pulling data off sensors and cutting and analyzing it in clunky software. Historically, this process has taken weeks of manual effort to perform at any scale or in production. The tooling for this process — spreadsheets, scripts, and shared drives — has barely changed since the 1980s.
That was tolerable when a defense program unfolded over a decade. It’s not tolerable now. Drone fleets, autonomous vessels, satellite constellations, and small modular reactors are built by teams that test early, test often, and iterate constantly, and each test produces sensor streams, logs, and video at rates the old stack never anticipated. The hardware is ready to iterate faster than the test stack can deliver feedback.
We see the same gap on the production line and in the field. The same hardware generates valuable data at every stage, but the infrastructure to connect that data and the engineering knowledge behind it has never kept pace. Teams stitch together time-series databases, dashboards, and spreadsheets, and the knowledge gained on the test stand is lost by the time the hardware ships.
The Solution
Nominal is a hardware intelligence platform that gives engineering teams the data infrastructure and tools to build, test, and operate complex physical systems. Nominal brings a team’s engineering data into one collaborative workspace for managing, monitoring, and analyzing high-rate sensor data, logs, and video, providing an edge platform that lets engineers capture data, control hardware, and run repeatable automated tests in Python, from lab benches to remote test ranges. Nominal runs in secure clouds, private environments, or on-premise, and runs wherever the hardware lives, including air-gapped facilities, leveraging Nominal’s purpose-built data warehouse architecture for high-rate, high-volume, and complex hardware data.
Built on that foundation, Nominal’s Analyst is its first purpose-built AI agent for hardware teams, bringing AI directly into the engineering workflow. Analyst works inside the platform, helping engineers find relevant data, build analytical views, search engineering files, and run computations. Instead of manually pulling together the information needed to investigate a problem, engineers can use Analyst to examine the evidence and test hypotheses, while staying in control of the conclusions and next steps.
Nominal is built to work alongside the systems teams already rely on. It connects to existing test infrastructure rather than replacing it, so programs can move faster without starting over. The result is test-to-decision time measured in minutes instead of days.
Why We’re Backing Nominal
We’re investing in Nominal because we believe it’s positioned to become the core data infrastructure for hardware engineering, from the first test stand to systems operating in the field. Nominal is already working with major customers across industry and government, including the U.S. Air Force and companies like Anduril, Shield AI, HII, Mach Industries, Hermeus, and Pratt Miller Motorsports.
Founders Cameron, Bryce, and Jason bring a rare combination of experience across military, defense technology, and enterprise software. Cameron served as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy and as a Navy congressional liaison before leading early defense programs at Anduril and Saildrone. Bryce was an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin, and Jason spent five years at Palantir leading the Foundry deployment team. That background gives Nominal a firsthand understanding of how mission-critical hardware gets built, tested, and fielded. As such, few teams are better positioned to be trusted partners to the engineers building these systems.
That trust extends across industry and government. Nominal serves the companies building next-generation aircraft, drones, and autonomous systems, as well as the government organizations responsible for testing them. When both sides of a program work from the same data, issues surface sooner and decisions move faster. As defense acquisition speeds up, we believe that shared foundation will become increasingly valuable to vendors and government buyers alike.
Nominal’s customers are the ones who continue to expand the breadth and capability of the platform. The dozen customers we spoke with, including Forterra, Muon Space, and others across our portfolio, expanded our perspective on where Nominal could become mission-critical. Several customers have integrated Nominal directly into their CI/CD pipelines, enabling meaningful firmware changes to be tested in simulation before deployment to the field. A satellite operator leverages Nominal for continuous telemetry monitoring and rapid iteration on constellations in orbit. A leading air autonomy vendor is building its certification case out of data that lives in Nominal.
Wherever complex hardware is built, whether in defense, energy, advanced manufacturing, robotics, or automotive, teams need to test faster without compromising rigor. Nominal is already serving customers across several of these industries, and we see a meaningful opportunity for the platform to grow alongside the next generation of hardware companies.
What’s Ahead
Nominal entered through testing because that is where the pain was most acute. Its customers are now pulling it along the lifecycle: live monitoring during test campaigns, acceptance testing pre-deployment, fleet health once hardware is deployed, and more. The opportunity ahead for Nominal is to become the default data infrastructure the entire hardware lifecycle runs on — owning both the underlying storage and the agentic capabilities built on top of Nominal data.
The tailwinds are clearer than ever. Defense acquisition reform is producing new-entrant vendors with critical, novel autonomy to the field. Reindustrialization means new factories are instrumented from day one. Energy and data-center buildouts are hardware programs with requirements to verify and fleets to monitor. Robotics and physical AI generate data at rates traditional automation never did. Nominal is moving from engineering-led adoption to large platform contracts with the largest defense, aerospace, robotics, and energy vendors and government programs. We share Cameron’s vision of a single platform that carries hardware data from development through operations, and we’re excited to support the team as they bring it to more industries and markets.
Salesforce Ventures is proud to participate in Nominal’s Series C, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Insight Partners, alongside existing investors including Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, and General Catalyst.
Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Nominal!
