Nominal, a four-year-old, Austin-based startup that offers an AI platform purpose-built for engineering and testing complex hardware, like aircraft, nuclear reactors, and smart factories, announced on Monday that it has raised a $240 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by Insight Partners, TechCrunch reported.

The new valuation triples the $1 billion mark Nominal set in March, when it announced a $155 million Series B extension led by Trae Stephens at Founders Fund. That earlier round was a preemptive deal, meaning an offer initiated by the investor rather than the startup. Other investors in the company include Sequoia, General Catalyst, and Lux Capital.

Nominal says it has more than 80 commercial and government organizations as customers, including five of the seven largest defense contractors. One of its key customers is Anduril, the defense company co-founded by Stephens. In October, the Air Force selected Nominal for a $71.2 million Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) investment. Nominal CEO and co-founder Cameron McCord is a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and an Anduril alum.

The platform connects hardware data with the engineering context behind it, giving engineers tools to understand complex systems and investigate problems faster. At Anduril, more than 300 engineers rely on Nominal across programs, and the company says analysis that once took five to six hours now happens in near real time. Nominal says the new funding will support deeper products across a machine’s lifecycle, from requirements verification and planning to fleet health, along with expansion into new industries.

Nominal’s rise reflects investor appetite for AI applied to physical engineering rather than software alone: tools that shorten the loop between building, testing, and improving complex machines are drawing large rounds even as general-purpose AI assistants become widely available.