When we said the data nerds over at Nominal are on a bit of a heater a few weeks ago, we weren’t kidding.
Yesterday, the hardware testing company unveiled its first acquisition after raising $80M at a $1B valuation in March, buying up robotics and engineering agentic AI startup Fid Labs to fully integrate its tech into Nominal’s platform, co-Founder and CTO Jason Hoch told Tectonic.
Hoch couldn’t disclose the terms of the deal.
We’ve covered Nominal a lot recently (and for good reason), but the startup’s flagship software platform, Nominal Core, serves as an all-in-one workspace where engineering teams collect, visualize, monitor, and analyze hardware telemetry, logs, video, and testing data in real time.
- The company counts four of the five largest US defense primes and many familiar names on the startup side as customers, including Anduril, Hermeus, Forterra, and Shield AI.
- Nominal has also worked extensively with the US military, inking a $53M IDIQ with the Air Force Test Center to put its platform to work on the F-47, B-21 bomber, Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), hypersonics, and other next-gen programs undergoing testing.
Fid fits: That broad hardware testing focus made Fid Labs a clear fit for Nominal’s customers and ambitions. Here’s what the first addition to the Nominal fam has been cooking up:
- The New York-based AI startup, founded in 2024, builds agentic software tools for hardware engineering teams.
- Fid Labs’ core product, fittingly called Fid, connects AI coding and research agents to robotics development environments, simulators, hardware documentation systems, and physical systems.
- That lets engineers automate sensor hookups, spec document searches, code debugging, and field error analysis.
Fid Labs’ software “covered hardware workflows that generalize cleanly across domains, which is part of why the fit with Nominal’s customer base was obvious from the start,” Hoch said. “The agent architecture [Fid] built wasn’t designed for one vertical—it was designed for the way hardware engineers work, full stop. That maps directly onto propulsion, nuclear energy, autonomy, and everything else our customers are building.”
No rest: After the acquisition, Fid Labs founder Adam Wolnikowski is joining Nominal as its AI Product Lead, and the tropical vacation to celebrate will have to wait, because he’s already been put to work.
- In case y’all weren’t aware of just how tight the Anduril mafia is, both Nominal and Fid Labs CEOs are alums of the neo-prime, and both companies count Anduril as a customer.
- Hoch said that “seeing how Fid’s capabilities performed inside an organization like Anduril” gave Nominal “real confidence” in their tech.
Wolnikowski’s first task on Team Nominal is developing an “AI Analyst built natively into Nominal’s platform that performs deep, contextual analysis across complex datasets,” the company said.
Hoch added that the AI agent is “already deployed with our trusted beta users and is rolling out to all of Nominal’s users, [but] importantly, it’s opt-in,” he said. “Not all of our customers will want the capability turned on, [and] we’re always working to satisfy our customers’ security and compliance needs.”
Click to add: According to Hoch, Fid Labs is just the first company they’ve added to the shopping cart.
“As Physical AI becomes a reality, customers will have needs from Nominal’s platform that we might not even be able to imagine today,” he said. “Companies that have successfully built something on our future roadmap, and share our ethos around partnering with mission-critical hardware organizations, are targets for us.”
“It’s hard to say specific capability areas, since I don’t want to disclose our motions in detail,” he added.
Good call. As the great Lil Wayne once said, “Real Gs move in silence like lasagna.”