Cameron Wiese, CEO and co-founder of Nominal, and Trey Lockerbie, Partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Anduril, discuss Nominal's $80 million Series C funding round led by Founders Fund. Cameron previously worked at Anduril in its early days around 100 employees, while Trey brings dual perspective as both investor and operator having co-founded Anduril.

The conversation covers Nominal's data platform for hardware testing and validation, which Cameron describes as 'GitHub for software-defined hardware.' The company now serves four of the five largest defense primes and has demonstrated significant ROI by reducing test campaign times by 50-60% on programs costing $3 million per day.

Drawing from Zero to One principles, Cameron explains how Nominal started with the acute problem of post-test analysis at Anduril - the manual process of reviewing multimodal telemetry data after hardware tests. The discussion explores how AI integration and the new administration's focus on acquisition reform are creating tailwinds for the business.

From $75M to $155M: The Preemptive Series C Story

Founders Fund preempted Nominal's Series C with an $80 million round just 10 months after their $75 million Series B, bringing total funding to $155 million

Cameron explains the rapid fundraising: 'I always like to say, if you are growing, then you're probably undervalued' and the external realities needed to match internal momentum from their 'breakout year' in 2025

Trey's dual role at Founders Fund and Anduril provided unique insight, noting 'we had an information flow' from portfolio companies about how 'important and necessary this software stack is'

The company has 'barely even touched' their previous $75 million, with Cameron joking 'You know what's better than $75 million? $155 million'

The GitHub for Hardware: Nominal's Core Platform

Nominal builds a data platform for hardware testing and validation, with Cameron explaining 'if you, for the last two decades, have been building software and you weren't using GitHub, like you would have been crazy'

The problem originated from Cameron's Anduril experience testing counter-UAS systems in Apple Valley, California, where teams would 'wake up super early before the sun comes up, pack a lot of these Anduril Interceptor drone and the tower system' for manual testing processes

Current federal testing relies on 'quite literally Microsoft Excel, MATLAB for performing analysis, maybe Python to glue things together, software like iAds' for billion-dollar weapons programs

Following Zero to One philosophy, Cameron emphasizes 'starting with small markets, that sort of philosophy, like, is super powerful' before expanding to the broader industrial market

Massive ROI: $3 Million Daily Test Campaigns Cut in Half

Nominal is saving customers 50-60% on test campaigns that cost '$3 million a day just for testing' and can run 'three, four, five, six months'

Trey describes Nominal as one of the rare cases where 'you look at the ROI and you're like, okay, this isn't a nice to have. This is actually like saving us money. It's creating efficiencies in the business'

The company now works with 'four of the five largest traditional defense primes' and has built trust through 'past performance that we could demonstrate both with commercial customers and the government'

Cameron notes the inflection point: 'If you're not using nominal, you're not testing properly' as word of mouth spreads through the industry

AI Integration and the Future of Hardware Testing

Nominal has deployed AI features where engineers can 'use a chat interface to start to interact with your test data' and simply command 'plot the kinematics of the drone'

Cameron envisions moving from 'one to one, man on man' to enabling 'one human engineer can actually start to affect and test and validate and interact with 50 pieces of hardware through like agentic workflows'

The company's defensibility comes from being 'that sort of like core piece of infrastructure' and 'continue to build closer and closer to the hardware' including embedded systems

Their North Star remains flexible: 'we will do whatever it takes to like satisfy the North Star for our customers, which is like helping them build and validate hardware better, faster, and sort of cheaper'

New Administration Tailwinds and Acquisition Reform

The current administration brings 'really strong, highly motivated, mission-aligned people that understand the value of technology and understand the importance of acquisitions reform' - Trey

Key appointments like Emil Michael as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering represent 'going from an academic under the Biden administration to the former COO of Uber'

Cameron highlights productive discussions around 'cost sharing, like deal agreements' where the government understands venture-backed businesses that 'will probably invest 80 million, a hundred million dollars into like software product R and D'

Trey emphasizes 'defense is not partisan at all. The defense budget has gone up every year, crossing Democratic and Republican administrations for over a decade now'

Scaling to 230 Employees and Strategic M&A Plans

Nominal plans to grow from 125 to '220 or 230' employees in 2026, with Cameron noting he's reached the scale where new employees ask 'how long you've been there'

The funding enables 'strategic M&A' opportunities, particularly 'acquire a product or a team that's building something really interesting, but might not have cracked the commercial code'

Cameron emphasizes hiring former founders: 'I really love bringing in former founders. I think they're just some of the best people to hire' following companies like Ramp's approach

Mission-driven recruiting gives them advantage in New York: 'there are tons of really good software engineers in New York who've been working in the SaaSification world' who want to 'build software that helps people with autonomous aircraft and fusion reactors'