E61 – Rebuilding the Test Playbook with Nominal

Test is where new military hardware goes to wait.Mike sits down with Jenn Wilson, Head of Federal at Nominal, to talk about test and evaluation, the least glamorous gate between a program and the warfighter.Nominal builds test data infrastructure for hardware. Founded in 2022 by Anduril, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin alumni, it reached a $1 billion valuation in March.Jenn’s take is that acceleration comes from optimizing what you test for. Cutting test points is the wrong lever.Topics include:Test and evaluation as a mission enablerHigh rate, multimodal test dataReal-time telemetry and closing the test loopDARPA CIPHER Forge and digital twinsClosing the sim to real gapThe F-35 crowdsourced flight data programKnowledge parity between primes and government testersLinksSign up for the newsletter! https://www.themerge.co/Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/the_mergeNominal homepage https://nominal.io/Nominal careers https://nominal.io/careersNominal LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/nominal-inc/Jenn LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-t-wilsonFollow us on...LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/themergeInstagram https://www.instagram.com/merge_newsletter/X https://x.com/MergeNewsletterFacebook https://www.facebook.com/themergenewsWebsite https://www.themerge.co/Chapters: 00:0000:32 intro01:47 why this, why now02:32 test is not sexy03:47 test as an afterthought05:40 more data, less insight07:18 where the name comes from07:54 the founding story10:43 Mike is a user11:16 streaming telemetry in real time13:14 design of experiments15:17 the Fid Labs acquisition16:31 DARPA CIPHER Forge19:35 closing the sim to real gap20:21 the commercial side23:31 lessons from Ukraine25:00 F-35 crowdsourced flight data27:15 fleet bugs found in days29:07 combined test force31:50 experimental operations unit32:34 speeding up test33:09 the pilot taking fire34:21 knowledge parity with the primes35:18 a billion dollar valuation36:03 hiring at Nominal#defensetech #podcast #military #testandevaluation #flighttest #digitaltwins #darpa #f35 #autonomy #nationalsecurity #airforce #dualuse #militarytechnology