Nominal Makes First Post–Series B-2 Deal With Acquisition of Fid Labs to Deepen AI for Hardware Data

New updates have been reported about Nominal.

Nominal has completed its first strategic acquisition since its $80 million Series B-2 financing, buying Fid Labs to accelerate AI capabilities across its hardware data infrastructure platform. The deal follows Nominal’s March round led by Founders Fund, which valued the company at more than $1 billion and was explicitly earmarked for acquisitions across the hardware data supply chain.

Fid Labs founder Adam Wolnikowski will join Nominal as AI Product Lead, overseeing AI strategy, roadmap, and team build-out, with an initial product launch of an embedded AI Analyst that can perform senior engineer–level diagnostics across complex time-series datasets. By integrating Fid Labs’ agents—which connect AI directly to development environments, simulators, and physical hardware—Nominal aims to automate integration and analysis tasks that currently consume significant expert engineering time.

The acquisition is designed to add an intelligence layer on top of Nominal’s existing core and connected testing products, which centralize and standardize hardware test data that today is typically scattered across proprietary formats, local drives, and ad hoc spreadsheets. CEO Cameron McCord said Wolnikowski’s approach closely aligned with Nominal customers’ pain points: teams overwhelmed with underutilized data, overloaded senior engineers, and junior engineers who lack years of pattern-recognition experience.

Nominal plans to embed domain-specific AI throughout the engineering lifecycle, covering analysis, monitoring, integration, documentation, and collaboration for sectors such as defense, aerospace, autonomy, advanced manufacturing, and energy. The company argues that effective “physical AI” requires models that understand hardware behavior, specialized data formats, and engineering intent—for example, distinguishing a nominal combustion profile in propulsion testing or correlating anomalies across a full flight test campaign without manual data wrangling.

With customers that include four of the five largest U.S. defense prime contractors and users building reusable rockets, autonomous aircraft, fusion reactors, and advanced defense systems, Nominal positions Fid Labs as a force multiplier on its rapidly scaling platform. The company reported 7x ARR growth in 2025 and now employs more than 150 staff across Los Angeles, Austin, New York, Washington, D.C., and London, underscoring its ambition to become the default data and AI layer for modern hardware companies.