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

Hardware engineering is undergoing a fundamental shift as companies move away from fragmented, manual testing processes toward centralized, data-driven platforms. Nominal addresses this by providing a system of record that bridges the gap between simulation and real-world telemetry, mirroring the evolution of software development tools like GitHub. By standardizing data acquisition and validation, engineers can accelerate development cycles and improve reliability in complex fields like aerospace and defense. The integration of AI agents into this workflow transforms testing from a static, deterministic matrix into a dynamic, gradient-based process. This evolution enables a single engineer to manage multiple systems simultaneously, fostering a new era of "physical AI" where hardware design becomes as iterative and flexible as software development, significantly reducing the reliance on traditional, inefficient testing paradigms.