The data nerds over at Nominal are (still) on a bit of a heater, this time with one of the Air Force’s most ambitious programs.
The testing startup announced yesterday that it’s been selected for a $71.2M AFWERX Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI)—split between $30M of Nominal’s own cash and $41.2M of government funding—to expand its work across the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft testing program to make sure those loyal wingmen are field-ready ASAP.
- The STRATFI program, for context, is designed to bridge the gap between SBIR/STTR Phase II prototypes and full commercialization or military adoption.
- Now that they’ve been selected for the STRATFI, Nominal’s “working with the CCA program office on modification to our [SBIR] Phase II with the Air Force Test Pilot School for the contract,” Nominal’s Head of Federal, Jenn Wilson, told Tectonic.
The CCA has already moved from prototype to production faster than any fighter aircraft program in history, and the Air Force is betting that a little touch of Nominal’s secret software sauce will help get ‘em flying and fielded even quicker.
Testing, testing: As a refresher, Nominal—founded in 2022 by Cameron McCord (ex-Anduril and Lux Capital), Jason Hoch (ex-Palantir), and Bryce Strauss (ex-Lockheed)—doesn’t build the shiny things that go zoom and boom, but is becoming pretty critical to making sure they actually work.
- Nominal Core, their flagship software, is designed as a one-size-fits-all platform for aggregated testing, bringing together all the fragmented data and testing pipelines into one central system.
- Instead of working across a bunch of different legacy tools, it lets engineering teams collect, visualize, monitor, and analyze hardware telemetry, logs, video, and test data in real time to tighten the feedback loop.
- That’s proven pretty popular: The company has inked testing deals with a whole bunch of defense tech hotshots like Anduril, Shield AI, Hermeus, Antares, Aerovironment (AV), Mach Industries, and Forterra, along with most of the largest US defense primes, according to Nominal.
Now, this isn’t Nominal’s first rodeo with the Air Force or the CCA program. The company has been working with vendors on the program (Anduril and General Atomics, for the uninitiated) for over a year, and inked a $53M IDIQ with the Air Force Test Center in April to put its platform to work on CCA, the F-47, B-21 bomber, hypersonics, and other big-time next-gen programs the service has in the works.
Growing up and out: This latest deal—separate from that IDIQ—expands the work from hardware developmental testing and flight data collection to “tactics development, fielding, and operational testing,” Wilson said. “A key hallmark of the [CCA] program is the competition and multi-vendor development of multiple increments [to look at] how you plug-and-play different autonomy providers, different platform providers to see how they perform against a mission together.”
- Through this STRATFI, Nominal’s platform will collect data from those hardware and software systems to give the Air Force a clear view of how they’re performing and how to best employ them.
While the initial focus is on the CCA program, “a lot of the core challenges that Nominal will solve with CCA are extensible to other programs, particularly the Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems,” namely the F-47, Wilson said.
The Navy—specifically the Program Executive Office for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons (PEO(U&W))—is also getting involved in the STRATFI deal, though with “a different autonomy platform that we’re working on at [NAS Patuxent River],” she added. “There’s really strong extensibility from what we’re driving with the Air Force over to the Navy, which is an example of that analogous demand for collaborative autonomy programs across the services.”
In other words, if there’s something the military needs drone-ified, there’s a good shot that Nominal’s behind the scenes helping make it happen.
