McCord: DoD is compressing hardware development lifecycles to 24 months
Cameron McCord · Sequoia Leads $75M Series B Into Nominal | Alfred Lin Joins Board · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Jun 12, 2025 · at 18:46
Cameron McCord, CEO of defense and aerospace testing software startup Nominal, explains the macro defense procurement shift driving testing bottlenecks.
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“The DoD is like shifting the way that it's thinking about a lot of these larger programs, trying to get away from 10, 12, 20 year program development life cycles. Like let's build the next exquisite, you know, bomber or exquisite plane or submarine. Right. Those things are massive capital investments. They take a ton of time and we're trying to much more get to You know, distributed systems, smaller, autonomous, attributable, like all these words that you hear. But what that fundamentally means from a development perspective is, Hey, we wanted things that used to take a decade. We want to do in 24 months. But we still want to do the same amount of testing. Oh, and by the way, there's more data.”
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