Nominal, the hardware data infrastructure platform serving defense, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing engineering teams, has acquired Fid Labs, a startup that built AI agents for robotics and hardware workflows. Adam Wolnikowski, founder of Fid Labs, joins Nominal as AI Product Lead. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition follows Nominal’s $80 million Series B-2 led by Founders Fund in March 2026, which valued the company above $1 billion. CEO Cameron McCord indicated at the time that capital would be used to pursue strategic acquisitions in the hardware data supply chain. Fid Labs is the first.
The core problem Nominal and Fid Labs are both addressing is the same: hardware organizations cannot find their test data, let alone run AI on it. Data lives in proprietary formats, local drives, and spreadsheets that only a handful of people understand. Nominal was built to provide a single platform where engineering teams capture, store, analyze, and collaborate on time-series data from hardware systems in real time. Fid Labs fills the intelligence layer on top, with agents that connect AI directly to developer environments, simulators, and physical hardware, automating domain-specific integration work that currently consumes hours of senior engineering time each week.
Wolnikowski’s mandate at Nominal is broad, covering AI strategy, AI roadmap, and team building. His first product, an AI Analyst built natively into Nominal’s platform, ships soon and is designed to perform deep, contextual analysis across complex datasets, the kind of work that currently requires a senior engineer and half a day. The longer-term vision is AI embedded in every part of the hardware engineering workflow, from analysis and monitoring to documentation and collaboration, with domain expertise baked in.
Nominal’s customers are building reusable rockets, autonomous aircraft, fusion reactors, and advanced defense systems. Four of the five largest U.S. defense prime contractors are on the platform. The company grew ARR 7x in 2025 and now counts more than 150 employees across offices in Los Angeles, Austin, New York, Washington D.C., and London.
KEY QUOTES:
“When I sat down with Adam for the first time, within twenty minutes he was describing the exact pattern our customers describe to us, teams drowning in data they’ve already collected, senior engineers stretched too thin, and junior engineers with all the talent in the world but years away from the pattern recognition that makes analysis fast. He had been building toward our thesis from a different starting point. The pieces fit.”
Cameron McCord, Co-Founder and CEO, Nominal
“The question I built Fid Labs to answer was: how can we accelerate hardware teams if we integrate their tooling in an AI-native way? Nominal has the product, the team, the customer base, and the data layer to make that impact exponential. This is where that work belongs.”
Adam Wolnikowski, Founder, Fid Labs and AI Product Lead, Nominal
