How AI Changes Hardware Engineering

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 

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(00:00) Trae Stephens & Cameron McCord

(01:11) Nominal raises $80M from Founders Fund

(03:32) Why Founders Fund made the investment

(05:22) From Palantir to Anduril: Trae’s investor-operator journey

(07:14) Nominal: the GitHub for hardware testing

(12:33) Why Sequoia believed Nominal’s TAM was much bigger

(15:36) Inside Nominal’s growing defense customer base

(17:32) Why government hardware testing still relies on Excel and MATLAB

(22:22) Cutting hardware testing time by up to 60%

(26:55) How AI changes hardware development

(37:22) Why the government is backing new defense tech companies

(33:35) Nominal's sales strategy

(45:44) Competing with legacy software giants

(46:24) Recruiting top engineers

(50:56) Early Anduril stories from the desert