Last month, we published our thesis on Industrial Resilience, which outlines multiple paths to invest in both the talent and the technologies that bolster the US and its allies’ industrial bases. Core to the thesis is the need to build new tools and capabilities tailored to modern hardware-native workflows.
The shift towards autonomous systems, the modernization of defense infrastructure, and the commercialization of space are driving waves of hardware innovation. As hardware becomes increasingly advanced, suffused with sensors and semiconductors, the volume of data it generates expands in orders of magnitude. The burden of designing and testing these complex devices is straining the systems used in the status quo.
Today, it is common for hardware engineers to have to stitch together a fragmented set of point solutions and custom code to process their test information, making it difficult to collaborate, trace errors, and iterate quickly. The hardware being built is diverse, but the problems of handling high-volume test data across simulated and physical systems are the same. From satellites to subsea drones, testing high-stakes hardware is arduous. Test scripts are bespoke, repetitive Python, Bash is written to transfer data across platforms, and data is often shared by email as Excel sheets.
Enter Nominal, which offers the bold vision of creating a modern software suite purpose-built for complex hardware workflows. Nominal is opinionated in that the team has made deliberate design choices that are deeply tailored and customizable to the needs of its end-users. The company’s first product, Scout, is a data analysis tool that enables test engineers to develop, validate, and monitor hardware. The product seamlessly syncs and plots test runs, and performs conditional logic checks on the data. Analytical workflows that often take hours can be done in a few clicks.
In Nominal, we found a deeply technical trio of co-founders - Cameron McCord, Bryce Strauss, and Jason Hoch - who together have lived the problem they have set out to solve. Cameron was an officer and nuclear engineer on the USS Helena1, then spent time as a senior liaison between the Navy and Congress, before working at Anduril, Saildrone, and Lux Capital. At Anduril, Cameron managed hardware and software engineers working on the company’s counter unmanned aerial systems capability. Bryce was a spacecraft engineer at Lockheed Martin, where he worked on satellites orbiting Jupiter and Mars, and the OSIRUS-REx mission, which returned America’s first asteroid sample in October 2023. Jason spent five years at Palantir where he led a key team deploying Foundry, giving him perspective on the integration lift and GTM motion Nominal plans to take in the hardware world. He then worked at Newfront and Vercel as an engineering manager focused on cloud infrastructure. Cameron has known Jason for almost 15 years, since their time at MIT.
In hardware testing & measurement, there’s little room, if not zero, room for error. The Nominal team is very aware that the systems they build will ensure the reliability of critical technology that lives depend on. All three founders share a deep sense of responsibility to the mission, optimism about the future that advanced hardware can unlock, and pragmatism about the challenges of building it. Modernizing critical infrastructure is an ever-growing national security imperative, and we are delighted to partner with Cameron, Bryce, Jason, and the entire Nominal team to help accelerate a renaissance of industrial innovation.
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1. Cameron oversaw the nuclear reactor on the USS Helena, a $1.5B fast-attack submarine ranked number one in its squadron during his tenure.
