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

Nominal cofounders (Cameron McCord, Jason Hoch) on why hardware testing is the critical wedge for physical AI — and why SpaceX’s internal tooling advantage can’t be replicated by 1,000 new hardware startups

• 4 of the top 5 US defense primes use Nominal; state-of-the-art at most primes is still engineers downloading data to laptops and sharing results via PowerPoint screenshots.
• SpaceX built proprietary internal test-data infrastructure from day one — Nominal’s thesis is that 1,000 new hardware entrants can’t replicate that, so it becomes the outsourced platform.
• DARPA CIPHER program: AI agents paired with digital twins recommend next optimal test conditions in real time, replacing rigid sequential test matrices with continuous gradient-curve learning.
• Nominal auto-flags bad training data for robotics/autonomy customers — detects when servo/motor anomalies corrupt telemetry before it enters model training pipelines.
• Hardware AI agents are bottlenecked by the same problem as coding agents: fast learning loops require verifiable feedback; building test/validation infrastructure is the prerequisite.
• Current ratio of humans-to-hardware-systems under test is ~1:1; Nominal’s goal is 1 engineer monitoring 50 systems in parallel via agentic tooling.
• Physics gets a vote: simulation-only approaches failed at Anduril circa 2018–2019; real-world telemetry fusion with simulation outputs is the actual competitive moat.
• Nominal is working on hardware products itself — cofounders signaled they are “further along than letting on” on capturing the full hardware data supply chain down to sensors.
• F-18’s structural inefficiencies are a direct product of broken test processes; better test infrastructure = more design flexibility baked into physical products from the start.
• AI in defense contracts went from near-disqualifier to forward-leaning priority under the current US administration — explicit shift in procurement posture.

Guests: Cameron McCord (Nominal cofounder), Jason Hoch (Nominal cofounder), Bryce Strauss (Nominal cofounder); hosted by Alfred Lin and Sonya Huang (Sequoia Capital) · 2026-03-10 · Watch on YouTube