Nominal: A Dual-Use Love Story Accelerating American Mission-Critical Industrial Systems
When deciding to start a company, finding your "why now" is a lot like surfing. To catch a wave, you need to obsessively watch the patterns of the swell and how the wave is breaking based on its size, shape, and direction. Once you have a wave in sight, you have to start paddling, often much earlier than you think, to pop up at just the right moment. In the case of new companies, often founders are deep experts in their industry.
Like the surfers who know a good break inside and out, the deep domain experts at Nominal have chosen to emerge today. Capitalizing on shifts and gaps in the heavy machinery market, they're debuting their platform for end-to-end continuous validation testing for aerospace, defense, industrial manufacturing, transportation, energy, and more. And catching the tail-winds of several substantial partnerships across the U.S. Government.
Early in their careers, Nominal’s founding team, Cameron McCord, Bryce Strauss, and Jason Hoch (more on them below), recognized a major macro shift taking place as industrial systems modernized. These new systems started generating increasingly complicated data systems, and there was a dearth of tools and software infrastructure available to validate these systems quickly and cost-efficiently. Left unchanged, this was poised to damage the U.S. industrial base's ability to modernize long-term, slowing down our government, and all of the adjacent private sector companies that support hardware deployment.
Enter Nominal, a platform for continuous end-to-end validation testing for Aerospace, Defense, Industrial Manufacturing, Transportation, and Energy sectors with various partnerships across the U.S. government. Nominal provides a robust holistic solution that enables industrial engineering teams to quickly test, validate, and deploy complex hardware systems. With simplified workflows and full systems visibility, the product enables cross-team and cross-org level collaboration that mirrors and complements engineers' iterative workflows today. Perhaps most importantly, Nominal’s full-stack data analysis enables a faster and more accurate review of test data and the validation of critical systems. The ultimate goal: To get our American hardware up and running better than ever before.
Cameron, Bryce, and James have spent a combined 15 years living and breathing defense industrial needs at the intersection of both the private and public sectors across SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Applied Intuition, NASA, Microsoft, and other household names. Cameron McCord is a veteran Nuclear Submarine Officer and Congressional Liaison, who has helped scale Anduril, Applied Intuition, and Saildrone. Bryce Strauss brings his perspective as a Lockheed Martin Spacecraft Systems Engineer in their Space Division. And Jason Hoch is a former Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir who adds extensive expertise working with both Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. government to build data products that make a real impact
We couldn’t be more excited for Nominal to emerge from stealth, with our participation in their $7.5M Seed round led by Lux Capital with support from Founders Fund and Human Capital, and fast followed by $20M of Series A funding led by General Catalyst, with support from Haystack, BoxGroup, and Overmatch.
It’s always a dream to work with a team taking on such a massive challenge at the right moment with the right expertise. And with all the flux in defense, energy, and industrial technology right now, we know the ripple effects will be wide-ranging, opening up numberless opportunities. If you’re building in one of these gaps, we’d love to hear from you.
