Physics Gets a Vote: Nominal Cofounders on Hardware Development in an AI World

Nominal cofounders Cameron McCord and Jason Hoch argue hardware testing is the verification layer that makes physical AI possible, and reveal they are further along building hardware than they admit.

• Nominal is used by 4 of the top 5 US defense primes, plus Anduril and the Corvette racing team.
• Status quo for most hardware companies: engineers download data to laptops, analyze in MATLAB, share results via PDF and PowerPoint screenshots.
• SpaceX built proprietary internal test data infrastructure early; Nominal’s thesis is the thousands of new entrants cannot replicate that investment.
• Working with DARPA on CIPHER: AI agents paired with digital twins recommend the next knowledge-maximizing test condition in real time, replacing sequential matrix burn-down over years.
• 10,000 sensors each producing a million data points per second is a routine scale for Nominal customers; anomaly detection surfaces issues humans miss.
• Vision: shift from 50 humans validating one hardware product to one human overseeing 50 systems in parallel using agentic tooling.
• McCord and Hoch strongly hinted Nominal will build hardware itself, saying they are further along than they are letting on.

2026-03-10 · Watch on YouTube