Nominal Acquires Fid Labs to Bring AI to the Full Hardware Engineering Lifecycle
Nominal’s first strategic acquisition brings AI-native hardware agents to the platform; Fid Labs founder Adam Wolnikowski joins as AI Product Lead
LOS ANGELES, April 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Nominal, the hardware data infrastructure platform that powers engineering teams across defense, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing, today announced the acquisition of Fid Labs, a startup that built AI agents for robotics and hardware workflows. Adam Wolnikowski, Fid Labs founder, joins Nominal as AI Product Lead.
When Nominal raised its $80 million Series B-2 led by Founders Fund in March—a round that valued the company above $1 billion—CEO Cameron McCord said the capital would be used to pursue strategic acquisitions in the hardware data supply chain. Fid Labs is the first.
WHY THIS ACQUISITION MATTERS
The promise of AI in hardware engineering has long outrun the reality. Most hardware organizations can’t find their test data—let alone run AI on it. Data lives in proprietary formats, local drives, and spreadsheets that only one person knows how to read. That’s the problem Nominal was built to solve: 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 that completes the stack. Adam Wolnikowski built agents that connect AI directly to dev environments, simulators, and physical hardware—automating the domain-specific integration work that currently consumes hours of senior engineering time every week. He built it for real robotics teams running real hardware. And he learned something most AI companies haven’t: where AI earns trust with engineers, and where it doesn’t.
EXECUTIVES ON THE ACQUISITION
“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; AI Product Lead, Nominal
WHAT ADAM WILL BUILD
Wolnikowski’s mandate is broad: AI strategy, AI roadmap, and the team to execute it. His first product ships soon—an AI Analyst built natively into Nominal’s platform that performs deep, contextual analysis across complex datasets, the kind of analysis that currently requires a senior engineer and half a day.
The ambition goes further. Nominal is building toward AI embedded in every part of the engineering workflow: analysis, monitoring, integration, documentation, collaboration. The differentiator is domain expertise. A propulsion engineer reviewing post-fire data needs AI that understands what a nominal combustion profile looks like, and what deviation is meaningful. A flight test team needs AI that can cross-reference anomalies across an entire test campaign without someone manually pulling data from three separate systems.
That requires AI that understands the hardware, the data formats, and the engineering intent behind the question being asked. That’s what Fid Labs was built to deliver.
THE LARGER PICTURE
Nominal 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.
Physical AI moves slower than software AI for a simple reason: the data infrastructure doesn’t exist. Hardware systems generate enormous volumes of test data—and almost none of it is connected, standardized, or usable at speed. Software teams have decades of tooling built around their data. Hardware teams still don’t. Nominal is building that infrastructure layer. Fid Labs accelerates when they can put AI on top of it.
This is how Nominal intends to become the platform modern hardware companies run on.
ABOUT NOMINAL
Nominal is the hardware data infrastructure platform trusted by the world’s most advanced engineering teams. Its connected testing and operations platform—Nominal Connect and Nominal Core—enables hardware organizations to capture, store, visualize, analyze, and collaborate on time-series data with the rigor that software teams take for granted. Nominal customers span defense, aerospace, autonomy, advanced manufacturing, and energy. Investors include Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, and General Catalyst.
ABOUT FID LABS
Fid Labs built AI agents for robotics and hardware engineering workflows, connecting AI directly to developer environments, simulators, and physical hardware systems. Founded by Adam Wolnikowski, the company focused on domain-native AI that could earn trust with engineers by automating integration work that demands deep hardware expertise.
Media contact: press@nominal.io
