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 enabler - High rate, multimodal test data - Real-time telemetry and closing the test loop - DARPA CIPHER Forge and digital twins - Closing the sim to real gap - The F-35 crowdsourced flight data program - Knowledge parity between primes and government testers **Links** - Sign up for the newsletter! https://www.themerge.co/ - Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/the\_merge - Nominal homepage https://nominal.io/ - Nominal careers https://nominal.io/careers - Nominal LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/nominal-inc/ - Jenn LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-t-wilson **Follow us on...** - LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/themerge - Instagram https://www.instagram.com/merge\_newsletter/ - X https://x.com/MergeNewsletter - Facebook https://www.facebook.com/themergenews - Website https://www.themerge.co/ **Chapters:**  00:00 00:32 intro 01:47 why this, why now 02:32 test is not sexy 03:47 test as an afterthought 05:40 more data, less insight 07:18 where the name comes from 07:54 the founding story 10:43 Mike is a user 11:16 streaming telemetry in real time 13:14 design of experiments 15:17 the Fid Labs acquisition 16:31 DARPA CIPHER Forge 19:35 closing the sim to real gap 20:21 the commercial side 23:31 lessons from Ukraine 25:00 F-35 crowdsourced flight data 27:15 fleet bugs found in days 29:07 combined test force 31:50 experimental operations unit 32:34 speeding up test 33:09 the pilot taking fire 34:21 knowledge parity with the primes 35:18 a billion dollar valuation 36:03 hiring at Nominal #defensetech #podcast #military #testandevaluation #flighttest #digitaltwins #darpa #f35 #autonomy #nationalsecurity #airforce #dualuse #militarytechnology