About this episode
Nominal is now valued at $1B after closing an $80M B-2 Acceleration Round led by Founders Fund, with participation from Sequoia, Lux Capital, and General Catalyst — just 10 months after Nominal’s $75M Series B led by Sequoia.In this episode of Sourcery, Cameron McCord (Co-Founder & CEO, Nominal) and Trae Stephens (Partner, Founders Fund; Co-Founder & Chairman, Anduril) break down why the round was preemptive, what Founders Fund was tracking from inside its portfolio (including Anduril), and why Nominal is becoming core infrastructure for teams building mission-critical hardware — from aerospace and defense to autonomy, energy, and advanced manufacturing.We get into the “GitHub for software-defined hardware” analogy, what’s broken in the current federal testing stack (yes: Excel + MATLAB + PDFs), how Nominal can cut major test campaigns by 50–60%, and why the real competition is bureaucracy + legacy incumbents. Cameron also shares how Nominal thinks about TAM expansion, dual-use strategy (and why Trae hates the term), strategic M&A, hiring 120–140+ people in 2026, and how AI changes the hardware engineering workflow (from post-test analysis to agentic parallelization).All Systems Nominal.Trae Stephens: https://x.com/traestephens Cameron McCord: https://x.com/CameronLMcCord Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ?https://x.com/sourceryy ??????? ????YouTube : https://youtu.be/iPl4oYhhPjY????????• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery• Turing—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems.
