Nominal announced on 9 November 2026 a $240 million Series C round at a $3 billion valuation, according to its release on nominal.io. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by Insight Partners. The release does not say whether the valuation is pre- or post-money. TechCrunch reported the same figures under the headline that the company “triples valuation to $3B in 8 months”.

The round

The release lists other investors as Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Avenir, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, M13, DE Shaw Ventures, Deployment Capital, Avra, Red Glass Ventures, Carpenter Capital, Audacious, PSP Growth, Overmatch Ventures, XYZ, Haystack and Brave Capital. Neither the release nor TechCrunch states a total raised to date. Nominal’s previous rounds were a $75 million Series B in June 2025 led by Sequoia Capital and, in March 2026, an additional $80 million at a $1 billion valuation led by Founders Fund, according to Nominal’s own post and SiliconANGLE; TechCrunch’s March headline gave $155 million as the total raised across those ten months.

What Nominal does

Nominal describes itself as a “hardware intelligence platform” that connects hardware test data with the engineering context behind it. The release names two products: Nominal Analyst, which it calls the company’s first AI agent, and Nominal for Developers, with access through SQL, APIs and MCP. It says the platform can run from cloud deployments to on-premises infrastructure, air-gapped environments and edge devices.

Use of funds

The release says the funding will support “deeper products for engineers and engineering enterprises”, including agents and applications for work across a machine’s lifecycle, from requirements verification and planning to scheduling and fleet health. Nominal also plans to expand into new industries and regions, including through strategic acquisitions. It says it acquired Fid Labs and Pull Systems this year, the latter extending the platform into automotive. Co-founder and CEO Cameron McCord said in the release: “Engineers stay in command, with purpose-built AI helping them do their best work.”

Company claims

The following figures come from Nominal’s release and have not been independently verified. Nominal says more than 80 commercial and government organizations use it, including five of the seven largest defense contractors. It says more than 300 engineers at Anduril Industries rely on it and that analysis that once took five to six hours now happens in near real time; that a pilot with HII reduced certain analysis tasks from hours to minutes and cut some production test steps by about half; and that Hermeus reduced the time between uploading and reviewing data by 80% while building its Quarterhorse Mk 1 aircraft in seven months. TechCrunch reports that the US Air Force selected Nominal in October for a $71.2 million Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) contract to support Collaborative Combat Aircraft capabilities. No revenue figure was disclosed.

Sources and notes

Sources: Nominal’s release and founder post on nominal.io, both dated 9 November 2026, which Lens read in full; TechCrunch (Julie Bort, 9 November 2026), read through a summary; the TechStartups funding roundup of 10 November 2026; and SiliconANGLE and Nominal’s own posts on the March 2026 round. Lens did not read Nominal’s separate posts on the STRATFI award or the Pull Systems acquisition. Reports differ on the company’s headquarters: the release says Austin, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Washington, D.C. and London, but is datelined Los Angeles, and TechCrunch calls Nominal Austin-based, while March 2026 coverage described it as Los Angeles-based.

Image: A wind tunnel at the Institute of Mechanical and Power Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, UJEP, Czechia. Photo: Mkozakovic, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Stand-in image of a test facility; it does not show Nominal or its customers.