In May 2025, Hermeus prepared to test its hypersonic airplane engine at Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert. The plan was to taxi the Quarterhorse Mark One and, if the results supported it, attempt liftoff on the same day. The team had two hours on the runway. Historically, reviewing the data between a high-speed taxi and a first flight could take weeks or months, according to Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica.
Hermeus had recently signed a contract with Nominal, whose platform was designed specifically for hardware testing. During the taxi, data streamed in on the health of the brakes, actuators, avionics, electronics, and control surfaces. By the time the aircraft had been towed back to the other end of the runway, the review was complete. “Everybody was thumbs up,” Piplica said, and the team concluded that the risk was at a safe level for an attempted flight. Minutes later, the Quarterhorse Mark One flew for the first time. Piplica sent Nominal CEO Cameron McCord a photograph after landing with the message, “Hey, we got it back.”
From military service to hardware development
McCord’s path to Nominal began with a family emphasis on service. Inspired by his grandfather and other relatives in the Navy, he paid his way through MIT through ROTC while double majoring in Nuclear Engineering and Physics and minoring in Political Science. After graduation, he became an officer aboard the USS Helena, SSN-725. His responsibilities included learning the complexity of the submarine and earning the trust of its crew.
During one mission in the North Atlantic, a sailor developed what appeared to be appendicitis. McCord assumed control of the ship and helped navigate it through difficult conditions so the sailor could reach the Norwegian coast guard and a hospital. Later, while still serving, McCord studied artificial intelligence through pre-downloaded Stanford classes. He contrasted that work with the submarine’s 1970s software and older hardware, and began considering technology as a faster way to create impact than a decades-long military career.
From 2017 to 2019, McCord served as one of the Navy’s liaisons to the House of Representatives, where he also became a resource for members and staff seeking explanations of emerging technologies. In 2020, he helped develop the House Armed Services Committee’s report on how technology could change warfare. He later worked at Anduril, where he saw teams struggle to organize telemetry, sensor data, logs, video, and images from hardware tests. Existing business-intelligence and SQL-based tools were not built for the high-frequency sensor data generated by robotic systems.
McCord explored the problem as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Lux Capital while completing an MBA at Harvard. At Harvard Business School, he met aerospace specialist Bryce Strauss, and the two discussed post-test analysis and data review. They recruited software engineer Jason Hoch, whom McCord had known from MIT. Nominal received its first check from Lux Capital 30 days before graduation. The company later developed a hardware-in-the-loop testing system and demonstrated it to a major satellite company. An initial unpaid pilot helped the founders continue developing the product and hire four full-time engineers.
Nominal’s work later supported Hermeus during the Mojave flight test. Piplica, who had also seen fragmented testing systems while working at NASA, said data within the Department of Defense was often siloed and moved manually through CSV files and Excel. In January 2025, Sequoia began due diligence on Nominal, contacting its customers before issuing a term sheet. By late March 2026, McCord was considering whether the company’s technology might improve hardware used in military conflicts, while acknowledging that he did not know whether it could have prevented recent casualties.