Early Career Firmware Engineer

Seattle lands another $1B startup: Here's the latest arrival in the industrial AI boom. by John Cook on Jul 29, 2026 at 9:10 am Seattle's emergence as a hub for companies building the next generation of industrial technology is drawing another high-profile startup. Los Angeles-based Nominal, whose software helps engineers build, test and validate complex hardware systems, is establishing a permanent Seattle office as it ramps up hiring and looks for a larger home in the region. The nearly 4-year-old company currently employs 11 people at a downtown Seattle co-working space, and expects to more than double that number by the end of the year. The company is also relocating Head of Product Stephen Slattery, the former director of technical operations at defense tech giant Anduril Industries, from Los Angeles to Seattle to oversee the new office. Employing about 200 employees globally, Nominal also operates offices in Austin, New York, Washington, D.C., and London. Seattle's concentration of tech and aerospace talent, along with proximity to key partners and customers, attracted the fast-growing company. Nominal CEO Cameron McCord said Seattle is one of only a handful of U.S. markets with a deep concentration of engineers experienced in solving large-scale infrastructure and reliability problems. Seattle's aerospace heritage also appealed to the company. "Some of the magic of Nominal is putting them in one room," McCord told GeekWire. The company boasts 75 customers, about half of which are in the defense sector. It also sells its software to companies in the energy, robotics and automotive arenas. The Seattle expansion comes just months after Nominal raised an $80 million venture capital round led by Founders Fund at a $1 billion valuation, part of a growing trend of companies serving industries where artificial intelligence is accelerating innovation in the physical world. "Nominal exists to help these engineering teams rethink their data supply chain: the end-to-end flow from instrumentation through acquisition, storage, analysis, reporting, and into the decisions that shape the next design," the company wrote in the funding announcement. Seattle has increasingly become a landing spot for companies operating at the intersection of AI and the physical world, while some of the region's fastest-growing homegrown startups - including Overland AI, Carbon Robotics, Brinc and Stoke Space - are helping define the category. In recent months, defense tech company Anduril has expanded its operations in the Seattle area. AI infrastructure startup Armada - which like Nominal is backed by Founders Fund - and AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI also have opened new offices or expanded engineering centers in the region. Nominal's McCord, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer who previously worked at Anduril, said conversations with former colleagues, including Anduril co-founder and COO Matt Grimm, helped reinforce Seattle's appeal. "I've been able to get a lot of advice and thoughts from him on what it looks like to properly enter the Seattle market," said McCord. "Everything from him is incredibly positive on the talent and density." While Nominal has gained traction among defense contractors - McCord said four of the five traditional U.S. defense companies use its software - he said the company increasingly sees opportunities across a number of industries. The energy sector - including nuclear, fusion and batteries - as well as AI data center infrastructure are growing areas of interest for the young company. The Seattle office will be more than an engineering outpost. McCord said Seattle will become a full cross-functional location, with engineering, sales, customer success, design and other teams represented as it grows. The company expects the Seattle office to reach roughly 20 to 25 employees by the end of this year and could double again to 40 or 50 employees by the end of 2027. It is currently looking for a permanent office space, likely targeting downtown Seattle. McCord said the Seattle office will play a key role in Nominal's growth as it looks to reimagine the unique challenges that industrial companies face in building hardware systems for this new era. "There's a huge market opportunity as the world reindustrializes," he said. See this interview with McCord by General Catalyst's Paul Kwan for more on the company:

Anduril targets $100 billion valuation. American defence technology company Anduril is in talks with investors over a new fundraising round that could value the company at around $100 billion, putting it on par with defence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, according to a Reuters report. The fundraising and valuation have not yet been finalized. In May, Anduril, which develops drones, autonomous systems, and military robotics, raised $5 billion at a $61 billion valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm founded by Josh Kushner. The company was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, who previously founded virtual reality company Oculus and sold it to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. Anduril is considered one of the few startups, alongside Palantir, to have successfully broken into the U.S. defence market at scale, securing major contracts with the Pentagon and allied governments. In June, Calcalist reported that the company had begun exploring the establishment of operations in Israel. According to Reuters, one structure under consideration is a two-stage fundraising process in which investors would commit upfront to participating in a second financing round at a higher valuation, potentially within a year. The second-stage valuation would depend on Anduril achieving certain financial targets. The financing discussions come amid heightened global demand for defense technologies following the recent conflict with Iran. If the company reaches the reported $100 billion valuation, California-based Anduril would be worth roughly as much as Lockheed Martin, one of the world's largest defence contractors and the manufacturer of fighter jets including the F-35, F-22, and F-16. Anduril reported $2.2 billion in revenue in 2025 and has doubled its workforce over the past year. In February, Luckey, who has previously described himself as a "radical Zionist," visited Israel. The trip, organized by Josh Wolfe, founder of venture capital firm Lux Capital and one of Anduril's earliest investors, included a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. During the visit, Luckey was also introduced to Israel's defence-tech startup ecosystem through DDR&D, which arranged meetings with 10 Israeli defence startups, including Smart Shooter, which has since gone public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, as well as Kela, Oz, Skana Robotics, Regulus, Magnus Metal, eyesAtop and AriEV. Anduril has already signed agreements with several Israeli companies, including ASIO, which is expected to supply components for the company's unmanned aerial systems. In addition, Anduril has expressed interest in security startup LiteVision, a portfolio company of venture capital firm Kinetica. The startup develops camera systems for drones and has already received investment from venture capital firm 8VC, an early investor in Palantir that also backs Anduril. In a statement, a spokesperson for Anduril said no decisions had been made about any future financing. "As a private company, we regularly evaluate opportunities to fund the growth of the business," the spokesperson said.

Anduril eyes $100B, Travis Kalanick raises $1.7B for robots, and the week funding became a valuation derby. Defense tech and physical AI pull the biggest checks, while fintech secondaries and seed rounds show the market is open for very different bets. Published July 25, 2026 This week's funding headlines split into two camps: the absolute units - Anduril at $100 billion and Travis Kalanick's Atoms at $1.7 billion - and everything else. If you thought mega-rounds were cooling off, this week says otherwise. The valuations are wild, the capital is flowing, and the sectors getting the money tell you where investors think the next decade lives. Defense tech is eating the world (literally). Anduril is in talks to raise at a $100 billion valuation, up from $61 billion in May and roughly triple its June 2025 mark of $30.5 billion. That's not a typo. The defense startup raised $5 billion four months ago and is already back out for another round at nearly double. Anduril builds autonomous systems - drones, surveillance towers, counter-drone tech - and sells them to the U.S. military and allies. The company's valuation trajectory looks more like a meme stock chart than a traditional defense contractor, but the underlying story is simple: governments are writing checks, and Silicon Valley finally figured out how to sell to the Pentagon without dying of boredom. The timing matters. Defense spending is up globally, Ukraine and Taiwan have made autonomy a live-fire R&D lab, and Anduril's founder Palmer Luckey has been very loud about moving fast where Lockheed and Raytheon move slow. If this round closes, Anduril becomes one of the most valuable private companies in the world - bigger than Stripe, SpaceX's last disclosed mark, or any fintech darling you can name. Physical AI gets the second-biggest check of the week. Atoms, Travis Kalanick's new "physical AI" startup, raised $1.7 billion this week in the largest disclosed round after Anduril's talks. The company is building automation-heavy infrastructure - think cloud kitchens meet robotics at scale. Kalanick co-founded Uber, sold it, started CloudKitchens (ghost kitchen real estate), and now Atoms is the next iteration: physical operations run by software and machines. The $1.7 billion haul suggests investors believe the "AI in the real world" thesis enough to write nine-figure checks before the product is even widely deployed. Also in the top 10 this week: Meshy AI, which builds tools to generate and manage 3D models using AI, and Sila, a battery tech company targeting advanced materials for energy storage. The common thread? Infrastructure. Not SaaS, not consumer apps, but the hard stuff: atoms, electrons, polygons. Revolut hits $115B in a secondary, Augustus crosses unicorn. On the fintech side, Revolut is running a secondary sale that values the UK digital bank at $115 billion, up from $75 billion in 2025. That's a 53% jump in a year, driven entirely by insider liquidity rather than a fresh capital raise. Revolut has been profitable, is expanding in the U.S., and investors still want in - so the company is letting early shareholders and employees sell at a higher mark. Meanwhile, New York-based banking startup Augustus raised $180 million in a Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by Tiger Global. Augustus is building modern banking infrastructure, and the round shows that investors are still willing to fund challengers in a crowded space if the unit economics and growth look right. Tiger has been quiet this year - this is one of their bigger bets in fintech since the 2021-2022 boom cooled. Elsewhere in fintech: Venezuela-based Cashea raised a combined $80 million (a $20M Series A and a $60M Series B back-to-back) to expand consumer banking and payments in Latin America. That's a notable vote of confidence in a market most VCs have historically avoided. Seed and pre-seed: the money is still there if you're early enough. Two early rounds caught my attention this week. Cordant, a NYC fintech infrastructure platform, raised $8 million in seed funding co-led by Motive Partners and Oak HC/FT. Banking-as-a-service has been a minefield lately - Synapse imploded, compliance got harder, and a lot of BaaS providers quietly died - but Cordant is betting there's still a product to build if you do it right. The investor lineup (two sector-focused funds) suggests they're not winging it. San Francisco-based Coverwatch raised $4.5 million in pre-seed from CoFound, Restive, KFund, and Liquid 2 Ventures to build AI-driven risk evaluation tools for commercial insurance. Insurtech has been a graveyard for a lot of startups, but underwriting and risk modeling are still unsolved problems where AI might actually help. Pre-seed rounds of this size are rare unless investors think the founder or the wedge is real. What it means. U.S. digital health startups raised $7.4 billion across 244 deals in H1 2026, up from $6.4 billion in the same period last year. 20 rounds of $100 million or more made up 45% of all capital deployed, and the sector saw 115 acquisitions, 71 of them in Q2 - the busiest M&A quarter since 2021. That's not a sector in retreat. That's a sector consolidating and scaling. This week's funding isn't a return to 2021's free-money vibes. It's selective, concentrated, and heavily tilted toward companies building hard infrastructure - defense, robotics, energy, fintech rails. The $100 billion and $1 billion rounds are outliers, but the seed and Series B checks are still clearing. If you're building something that touches the physical world or the financial system, the money is there. If you're building another chat wrapper, good luck.