Nominal

We're excited to announce our $75M Series B led by Sequoia Capital to modernize hardware testing. We’re delivering the software stack purpose-built for hardware engineers, making continuous testing as seamless for hardware as it is for software. With this raise, we’re accelerating our Core and Connect product roadmaps, building new products across the hardware test stack, and more than doubling our grounded, obsessed, world-class team. Thank you to our customers for trusting Nominal as you build, test, and operate the hardware shaping the future. Your mission is our purpose. We’re grateful to our investors who share our vision for the future of hardware engineering: Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, Avenir, XYZ Venture Capital, Haystack, Overmatch Ventures, PAX Venture Capital, PSP Growth, Audacious Ventures, & Red Glass Ventures 🛫 Learn more: blog.nominal.io/series-b 📰 Thank you Paayal Zaveri and Bloomberg for the feature: https://lnkd.in/gPtXch-2 🏃 Join us → nominal.io/careers

We just rebuilt our brand from the ground up. Our products show up on rocket test stands, manufacturing lines, energy systems, and defense platforms. Places where the stakes are real and the hardware has to work. As we showed up in more of these environments, we realized our brand needed to carry the weight of the promises we make to our customers. The new identity is built on three principles: acceleration (test, learn, operate faster), precision (get it right every time), and connection (link teams, sites, and systems from test to operations). These are the principles that define how resilient hardware actually gets built. You'll see the new look rolling out everywhere. The commitment stays the same: equipping engineers with tools to test, validate, and operate resilient hardware. All Systems Nominal. → nominal.io

#LATechWeek is packed with CEO and investor events, but almost nothing for the engineers and operators in the arena. So we partnered with Lightspeed VP to host a gathering that celebrates you: the operators and Nominal power-users actually building resilient machines. If you're working on aerospace, defense, automotive, or industrial systems where test data actually matters (read: lives depend on it), you'll want to be in the room. Why come: - Get opening remarks from Lightspeed Partner Guru Chahal - Hear from Nominal Co-Founder Bryce Strauss - Trade lessons with people who understand why "just use a spreadsheet" isn't an answer - See how teams are actually using Nominal in their daily workflows This is for the engineers in the trenches making missions possible. Thank you to our friends and co-hosts at LSVP Guru Chahal and Connor Love. All Systems Nominal 🚀 Space is limited. RSVP now: https://lnkd.in/gb_EbdBy

Testing infrastructure is becoming the bottleneck in defence production. At this week's Resilience Conference in London, CEO Cameron McCord joined Dr Rich Drake from Anduril Industries, Oluseun Taiwo from Solideon, and Leslie Hitchcock from Resilience Media to discuss what's actually slowing NATO's industrial ramp-up. The consensus: it's not hardware capacity. It's outdated procurement processes and testing systems that can't keep pace with modern autonomous systems. "It's a solved problem to test, deploy and monitor software," Cameron said. "It's not solved for software-defined hardware, robotic systems, autonomous systems – and that's where production now gets stuck." This gap isn’t just a technical hurdle; it’s a strategic risk. Without the right test infrastructure, even the most advanced platforms can’t move from lab to field at the speed that today’s defence environment demands. We've built the infrastructure for testing and certifying software. Now we're bringing that same capability to defence manufacturers in Europe through our new London office. The technology exists. The talent exists. What's needed is the infrastructure to move faster, from test to deployment to production at scale.

- Do you love inspecting ClickHouse query ProfileEvents to see how much time queries are spending reading from object storage and optimizing configuration and query patterns so they spend less time waiting on I/O? - Do you feel alive when you've analyzed our Kafka consumer metrics and come up with the perfect set of config & infra changes to unleash the floodgates in the data ingestion pipeline? - Does it give you goosebumps when you ship a change and see that Datadog graph drop lower (or higher, if you wanted it to)? - Does it bring you joy to pinpoint the perf bottleneck of the whole backend to a single service because of the SLOs you instrumented and work with the devs to fix it? - Do you smile when the automated load testing you built uncovers a critical perf regression on staging before it hits prod? If you answered yes to any of the above, I think you might just be the semi-crazy person we're looking to add to our crew at Nominal. Come join me and the crew of much-more-cracked-than-I engineers that I have the honor of working with, like Michael Bauer, Helen Yu, Stephanie Yu, Mark Greatorex, David Vogelbacher and others. Our business is growing like crazy. It's a very exciting time as our customers - who are building things like rocket engines, nuclear fusion reactors, and eVTOL aircraft - are starting to use Nominal to test the hardware they're building at the same cadence you would software: with every change. That equates to a lot more Nominal usage, and a lot more data! I've been spending a lot of my time going deep into the internals of our backend applications and databases to scale and increase the reliability of our infrastructure to support all of this cool and important stuff being built by our customers. We're looking for a seasoned SRE / Production Engineer to join us to help us build out this function more broadly at the company. Reach out directly with your resume and/or apply online if you're interested! https://lnkd.in/g-SxDZBy

Want to see the future of energy? It’s at Greentown Labs. And the world needs it in the field – as fast as possible. That’s why we're launching Nominal Laboratory in Greentown Houston. Greentown’s 200+ startups are tackling the hardest problems in energy: alternative systems, carbon capture, long-duration storage, and more. Nominal will provide hands-on test consultations to help scale their products from prototype to commercial hardware. With Nominal’s Connected Test Stack, Greentown members can prove their future works – in the field, across sites, every time. Because the future moves at the speed of test. Follow the link in the comments to learn more about our partnership with Greentown.

Want to see the future of energy? It’s at Greentown Labs. And the world needs it in the field – as fast as possible. That’s why we're launching Nominal Laboratory in Greentown Houston. Greentown’s 200+ startups are tackling the hardest problems in energy: alternative systems, carbon capture, long-duration storage, and more. Nominal will provide hands-on test consultations to help scale their products from prototype to commercial hardware. With Nominal’s Connected Test Stack, Greentown members can prove their future works – in the field, across sites, every time. Because the future moves at the speed of test. Follow the link in the comments to learn more about our partnership with Greentown.

Scout AI is pioneering Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that enable defense robots to perceive, understand language, and act autonomously in GPS-denied environments. Training Fury, the foundation model for defense robotics, requires massive amounts of annotated data. Traditional methods couldn't keep pace with their rapid iteration cycles. With Nominal, engineers simply speak observations during field tests: "Steep terrain ahead," "Negative obstacles detected" that are automatically captured and time-synced with telemetry. This creates a seamless pipeline from real-world testing to model retraining, delivering 50% faster annotation. “In autonomy, iteration speed is everything. Nominal lets us compress the development cycle of data collection, training, and testing without compromising safety. It gives us the confidence to scale from tens of unmanned systems to the world’s largest multidomain autonomous defense fleet.” — Collin Otis, CTO & Co-founder, Scout AI Infrastructure determines innovation speed. Read the Mission Brief: https://lnkd.in/gx3bjKT9

Every autonomous domain used to need its own toolchain. Ground. Maritime. Aerial. Each with unique expertise, extra training, and slow handoffs. Nominal changes that. Nominal Core + Connect unify ingestion, synchronization, and analysis into a single workflow across domains. The result: faster verification, fewer tools, and insights that travel with your teams, no matter the vehicle. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/dmY5HyMf

A few days into Sept, but recapping a busy August from the General Catalyst team: - We gathered our Famiglia committed to the health assurance mission at our third annual Health Assurance Summit, featuring over 100 startup founders, health system CEOs, and policymakers who are actively building out the architecture for proactive, affordable, and accessible healthcare systems worldwide.   - We partnered with 7 seed and early stage companies, including Paradigm, Pronto, Dealops, and Eyebot. Welcome Anna, Anjali, Spyri, Matthias, Jack, and their teams to the Famiglia! - We doubled-down on 17 of our existing investments, with Jeh Aerospace, Tahoe Therapeutics, August Health, etc., continuing to support these companies as they build for long-term endurance. - We led 5 new growth investments, including Pantomath. Welcome Shashank, Somesh, and Narayana, and team to the GC Famiglia! - We unveiled our investment in a Creation company, Titan, partnering with Saurin and David to apply our AI-enabled roll up strategy to power the next generation of MSPs. Marc and Kate also published a piece dissecting our AI-enabled roll up playbook. Read here: https://lnkd.in/gFdXVr66 - Applied Intuition announced their Self Driving System for passenger vehicles, bringing the same transformative tech that’s been driving trucking, mining, and defense to the mass market. Congrats Qasar, Peter, and team. - Gusto announced they have entered into an agreement to acquire Guideline, helping Gusto expand on their mission to support small businesses by providing retirement benefits support. Congrats Josh, Kevin, and team. - A few moments for our portfolio companies: Nominal and Rox were recognized on Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups, a well-deserved recognition of Cameron, Ishan, and their teams. Anthropic’s Dario, Kyle, Jared, and Mike, and Moonvalley & Asteria Film Co’s Natasha Lyonne were all included on the Time100 AI list. - The General Catalyst Institute submitted our response to the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Request for Information on digital asset market structure legislation, communicating the priorities of founders in the fintech space to help inform future policy. Read the full response here: https://lnkd.in/ehryYQpx - Jeannette and Robin published a piece in Sifted on the choices European founders, policymakers, and corporate leaders need to make to maintain Europe’s entrepreneurial momentum. Read the full piece here: https://lnkd.in/gNpX_Usz - We welcomed 9 new team members across GC. That’s a wrap on the summer. Onwards to fall.