Nomial

Nominal builds a software platform for teams that design, test, and operate complex hardware, spanning aircraft, satellites, robotics, energy systems, and industrial machinery. Its flagship product, Nominal Core, captures and organizes telemetry, logs, video, and simulation results in a single workspace , replacing the mix of CSVs, custom scripts, and legacy test rigs that hardware engineers typically stitch together. The bet is that faster, better instrumented testing is the real bottleneck in modern hardware development, and shortening that loop is what lets a team ship on a weekly cadence instead of a decade one. This launch spotlights that thesis through a customer story with Shinkei Systems, whose Poseidon robot automates ike jime, the Japanese method of humanely killing fish to preserve quality . In the video, Shinkei mechatronics engineer Ed walks through how the machine uses computer vision to locate the brain and gills on every individual fish, and how the team validates it through software unit tests, hardware in the loop rigs, sea salt spray environmental stands, and long duration cycle testing at the factory before it ever ships to a partner fishing boat. It is a concrete illustration of what Nominal means by "accelerate test," a robotics company running thousands of instrumented cycles across lab and ocean conditions and pulling telemetry off every production unit to keep iterating. Nominal was founded by Bryce Strauss, Cameron McCord, and Jason Hoch , who saw these pain points firsthand from their experiences at the U.S. Navy, Lockheed Martin, and with Palantir's customers before building a platform aimed squarely at the current wave of American hardware companies. For founders and operators watching the space, this launch is less a feature announcement and more a signal about who Nominal is targeting, technically ambitious hardware startups where testing quality directly determines product quality.