Nominal raises $75M Series B led by Sequoia to accelerate systems testing for defense and enterprise

Summary

Nominal, a systems testing software company for defense and hardware, raised $75 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital. Alfred Lin joined the board. Lightspeed Venture Partners, through Guru Chahal and Connor Love, entered as a new investor alongside continuing backers General Catalyst, Lux Capital, and Founders Fund.

CEO Cameron McCord is deploying the capital toward three goals: expanding from early hardware startups into Fortune 500 companies and defense primes, building additional products beyond the core testing platform, and moving internationally, starting with the Paris Air Show and a UK office in the coming weeks.

Testing inefficiency

Nominal targets two entrenched problems in hardware testing. One is legacy displacement: vendors like Siemens, Emerson, and National Instruments run pre-cloud software built before centralized data existed. The other is companies cobbling together general-purpose tools never designed for hardware, absorbing the productivity drag. McCord argues Nominal is cleaner for both cases and that the legacy vendors represent billion-dollar businesses worth disrupting.

Product architecture

Nominal operates two products. The core cloud platform centralizes telemetry, sensor data, logs, and test data for analytics and automation. Nominal Connect is a desktop application built in Rust and running on Unreal Engine. It delivers sub-10-millisecond latency and 3D visualization of robotic systems or drones with live telemetry. The application runs air-gapped for test sites in Mojave or downrange environments and syncs to the cloud once connectivity returns.

Test velocity as the metric

Customers prioritize test cadence above engagement metrics. Brian Schimpf, CEO of Anduril, told McCord that the speed of individual program testing is the single most important indicator of product success. Nominal's benchmark compresses a 9-month test campaign to 6.5 months. On a $200 million DoD program, that compression carries significant value.

Nominal's product philosophy rejects standard SaaS engagement metrics. The goal is for a test engineer to open the app, extract the needed insight, and move on. Time-in-app does not drive the roadmap.

Customer base and geography

The current customer base skews toward startups and scaleups in the new hardware wave, but enterprise and defense prime traction is growing quickly. International customers in Europe already use the platform. McCord plans a physical European office contingent on building meaningful backlog first. The AUKUS-adjacent market aligns with Nominal's US customer needs.

McCord's previous roles shape the company's positioning in the defense-industrial software stack. He led product and growth at Anduril, advised Applied Intuition, headed defense at Saildrone, and was an investor-operator at Lux Capital. The Series B closed in roughly 10 days.