Nick Blair, son of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, founded defense-tech startup Pyra and is in talks with investors to raise about $200 million. The company has barely talked about its product yet, but plans to launch it this summer.
Nick Blair, son of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, founded defense-tech startup Pyra and is in talks with investors to raise about $200 million. The company has barely talked about its product yet, but plans to launch it this summer.
This was reported by the Financial Times.
Little is known about Pyra's technology so far - the media writes without specifying that the startup is working on a technology that will allow combining different systems into a single source. Negotiations on investments have not yet been completed, so their final amount may change. Pyra said that it created the company to support the security of the UK and its allies. The startup is betting, in particular, on the development of Britain's own digital defense capabilities.
This is not Blair's first project in defense-tech. He also co-founded and heads the British startup Skyral, which creates digital models and simulations for defense and national security. With their help, the military can, for example, model a city or a battlefield and check the consequences of various decisions before applying them in reality. Last year, Skyral already raised about $20 million.
Then in July, Skyral received a much bigger round of government funding. The company joined the Omnia Training consortium, which signed a 15-year, £2 billion contract with the British Ministry of Defense. The project is creating a digital “combat lab” for the army with AI, analytics, and virtual environments. It plans to train up to 60,000 soldiers a year.
Pyra comes amid a certain investment boom in defense-tech. For example, this week, the British Cambridge Aerospace, which develops means of intercepting drones and missiles, raised $300 million. According to PitchBook data cited by the FT, startups in this sector had attracted $12.3 billion in venture investment by the end of June - almost double the amount for the same period last year, and already more than $9.95 billion for the whole of 2025.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that European defense-tech is already attracting even larger sums. In May, German AI drone developer Helsing was preparing to close a $1.2 billion round at a company valuation of $18 billion.
