Nominal

Most AI-in-defense conversations happen in conference rooms. The hard part happens at the sensor, on the vehicle, during the test, when you need answers from live data before the next run. That's what Nominal builds for every day. This weekend, our CEO Cameron McCord joins the "Decision Dominance: Artificial Intelligence for the Modern Front Line" panel at the Harvard Business School & MIT Sloan School of Management Technology & National Security Conference, alongside leaders from Smack Technologies Inc., Lumbra, and moderated by Harvard's Belfer Center. See you in Cambridge. 🔗: http://technatsec.com/

Most hiring advice assumes your candidates have five comparable offers from companies doing the same thing. At Nominal, engineers who've shaped how we build came from roles that had nothing to do with data platforms. They came from test ranges, launch ops, and flight software teams. People who knew the pain before we built the product. General Catalyst wrote a playbook on how companies like ours think about this. We're in it. Worth reading if you're building (or joining) a team in aerospace, defense, or robotics.

Great to see Representative Vince Fong at the Nominal LA office yesterday morning! 🚀 California is home to some of the most consequential hardware test and evaluation programs in the world. We were honored to host the Congressman and share how Nominal is helping teams at Edwards AFB and beyond move faster, test smarter, and deliver mission-critical hardware with confidence. Rep. Fong's leadership in the CA tech ecosystem has been instrumental in keeping that work funded and moving forward. Proud to have a champion like him in our corner. 🇺🇲

Building at the frontier of engineering takes more than ambition. It requires better tools. MS/MBA alum Bryce Strauss (2022) is doing exactly that as co-founder of Nominal, an AI-driven data platform transforming how complex hardware systems are designed, tested, and deployed. What began as frustration with inadequate internal tools at Lockheed Martin has grown into a billion-dollar company supporting more than 80 organizations, including four of the world’s five largest defense contractors. At Harvard Business School’s joint MS/MBA program, Bryce and his co-founders combined deep technical expertise with business fundamentals to build a company designed for long-term impact. Through both the curriculum and co-curricular resources, including participation in the Rock Summer Program (now Rock Venture Catalyst), they shaped Nominal’s approach to solving mission-critical challenges across aerospace, defense, and beyond. Nominal’s trajectory reflects a broader trend across the HBS community: founders applying interdisciplinary training to tackle complex, high-stakes problems and build enduring companies. Read more about Bryce’s journey and Nominal’s impact: https://lnkd.in/exKvnr3M   #HBSEntrepreneurship #MSMBA #HardTech #AI #Startups #RockCenter 

Software used to be serious. Purpose-built for aerospace, defense, mechanical engineering. Then we got two decades of click optimization and vanity metrics. Cameron went on TBPN and walked through our product catalog live. Because the best tools in the world used to ship in catalogs like this. And good news, we just got more in stock. Request a copy: catalog.nominal.io

America's next-generation unmanned systems are being built in Huntington Beach. Mach Industries is building them fast. Mach designs and produces unmanned systems — Viper, Glide, Stratos — for the US Army, United States Air Force, and USSOCOM. As their program portfolio expanded and flight test tempo increased, their engineers needed a way to ingest, compare, and act on test data across distributed teams without losing the traceability that active DoW programs demand. Mach selected Nominal to run that infrastructure across their entire development arc: from early flight test through high-rate production at Forge, their manufacturing facility in Huntington Beach. Engineers now ingest flight and ground run data in seconds, compare across runs from a single platform, and catch anomalies before they compound across a growing fleet. "National security depends on America's ability to field asymmetric capability faster than adversaries can respond. Nominal helps us compress the loop between test and production so we can do exactly that." — ethan thornton, CEO, Mach Industries The teams moving fastest are the most disciplined about data. 🔗 Full press release in the comments.

Albedo flies low. Like really low. Why? Clarity wins. For decades, high-resolution imagery meant billions of dollars, a decade of lead time, and a satellite in a distant orbit serving one slice of Earth at a time. The Albedo team recognized this is a problem hiding in plain sight. Very Low Earth Orbit sits below the ISS, below Starlink, below everything else flying at scale. Closer to Earth means sharper imagery. But the environment down there is brutal: atmospheric drag, atomic oxygen, thermal extremes. That means purpose-building a satellite that's aerodynamic by necessity. Pushing the limits of guidance, navigation, and control to hold a precise orbit that would otherwise decay in weeks. Solving problems the rest of the industry never had to attempt. The Albedo team did it. And it works. Clarity 1 is flight proven and mission ready. Now they're preparing to scale design and manufacturing. Serious satellites need serious engineers. Work at Albedo → albedo.com/company#jobs 

Obsession looks like the lead accountant working in the pits on race weekends. At Pratt Miller, winning is everyone’s job. And they’re obsessed with winning. Elite engineers from around the world join Pratt Miller to push Corvettes to the max and set the standard for the rest of the field. Some stay for a high tempo career, others become leaders across aerospace, energy, and other sectors that benefit from a winning mentality. Serious racing needs serious engineers. Work at Pratt Miller: prattmiller.com/careers Engineered to win.

Two-thirds of wild-caught fish rot before they ever reach a plate. Shinkei built Poseidon, a mini-fridge sized robot, to fix that. Ike-jime. Six seconds. Commercial scale. On American fishing boats. What used to require a master’s hand at a $400 omakase counter is now automated on deck. Their mission is our purpose. And they’re hiring. Serious hardware requires serious engineers. Work at Shinkei: shinkei.systems/about

We started Nominal Connect from a deliberate belief: test engineers deserve better software, and Python — the default of modern engineering scripting — should offer a first-class developer experience for hardware testing. From there, the constraints were clear. Test stand software has to run disconnected, sit close to hardware, handle millions of multi-modal data points per second, with zero tolerance for crashing mid-test. Those constraints led us to Rust, a game engine (Bevy), and an immediate-mode UI framework (egui). After a year shipping to customers: 3.4M data points/second (with more headroom ahead), zero race conditions across a heavily multithreaded codebase, and 3D visualization that should have taken years to build. Jasmine covers the tradeoffs too (compile times, layout complexity, cross-platform pain) and where we're going next. Full writeup in the comments.