Confidential - investor materials
A national network that starts with tyre safety
Pre-seed at £8m-£10m pre-money. Five years of build, a working deterministic engine, a costed hardware family and sixteen partner-ready portals - funding manufacture and deployment, not discovery.
The one-sentence thesis
AiR is not a tyre-equipment manufacturer. It is a distributed mobility infrastructure company whose deployment vehicle happens to be the most-used, least-intelligent machine on the British forecourt.
One machine is a product. Ten thousand are an IoT estate. One hundred thousand are a national edge-compute and data platform. The same hardware earns from six independent layers at once, and every new installation increases the value of every existing one.
Raising
£0.0m
At £8m-£10m pre-money, 16.7% at the top of the range
Years of unfunded build
0
18-20 hour days, roughly 34,675 hours
Twin sessions executed
0
93.3% fault detection, 0% false positives
Modelled ARR at 100k nodes
£0.0m
Base case, carbon revenue excluded
The ask
£2m pre-seed, milestone-gated
Enough to make the hardware real, validate the safety engine independently, and convert the pipeline into signed pilots. Not enough to scale manufacturing, and deliberately so.
Use of funds
Three working TP-4 prototypes plus the home wall unit reference build
Pressure-engine validation, electrical/pneumatic testing, DPIA, UKCA route
Five to eight supplier RFQ, DFM iteration, target BOM confirmation
Dealer and forecourt pilots with instrumented data capture
Convert the OEM, dealer group, roadside and forecourt pipeline
Cash buffer to the Series A gate
What this round buys
- Three working prototypes bench-validated against calibrated references
- Two signed pilots or LOIs before any scaled manufacturing commitment
- Independent safety and methodology review of the pressure engine
- First 100 live nodes with real session data flowing
Non-negotiable decision rules
Do not scale manufacturing until two or more signed pilots or LOIs exist and target unit economics are validated.
Do not monetise carbon until methodology, additionality, verification and a registry route are confirmed.
Do not describe any safety body as an endorser unless that organisation has explicitly authorised the wording.
Do not let a model invent a pressure use approved vehicle and tyre data with deterministic safety rules only.
Do not sell edge compute first tyre safety is the wedge; compute monetisation follows installed scale.
Prioritise strategic capital where the money also brings distribution, validation or manufacturing leverage.
Valuation
Defending £8m-£10m pre-money
Six independent arguments, none of which relies on deployed hardware, signed contracts, carbon revenue or a claimed endorsement.
Replacement cost of what already exists
Recreating the platform, engine, product family, portals, evidence base and commercial architecture from a standing start is a two-to-three year programme for a team of eight to twelve. At UK blended deep-tech rates that is £3.5m to £6m of engineering and design cost before a single customer conversation, and it does not buy the five years of domain judgement embedded in the safety rules.
Pre-revenue deep-tech comparables
UK pre-seed hardware and deep-tech rounds with working technical architecture, a defined manufacturing path and named strategic pipeline typically price at £6m to £15m pre-money. AiR sits above the midpoint because the software platform is demonstrable today and the hardware BOM is costed, not conceptual.
Distribution already in motion
Live outreach with a prestige OEM contact and the operations director of the national tyre-safety charity, plus fully built, brand-specific portals for eleven marques, three roadside groups and a dealer group. The distribution work that usually follows a seed round has largely been done in advance.
Optionality investors are actually buying
The same estate carries six monetisation layers: hardware, recurring software, fleet services, data, sovereign edge compute and communications resilience. A pre-seed at £8m-£10m buys exposure to a network business whose modelled base case reaches £48.8m ARR at 100,000 nodes, not to a single hardware SKU.
Founder cost basis
Five years of continuous development at 18-20 hour days is roughly 34,675 hours. At a conservative £95/hour contractor equivalent that is around £3.3m of unfunded, uncapitalised work already in the business. Investors are not being asked to fund discovery. They are funding manufacture and deployment.
What the valuation is not resting on
No carbon revenue, no signed contracts, no deployed hardware and no claimed endorsements are in the £8m-£10m case. Carbon is modelled at zero in the base case until a methodology, additionality argument, third-party verification and registry route exist. Removing every unproven line is precisely why the number defends.
What five years actually produced
Deterministic pressure engine
A layered selection model that never invents a PSI value: manufacturer profile, tyre specification, load profile, thermal allowance, then a hard safety clamp.
Four-channel hardware architecture
Simultaneous per-wheel control with independent isolation, retractors, transducers and a documented BOM at unit level.
Digital twin and regression harness
The same engine runs the machine, the app, the twin and the batch regression suite on this page.
Product family
Forecourt TP-4, home wall unit, handheld pump and smart telemetry caps, each with its own commercial role.
Sovereign mesh and edge-compute architecture
LoRa/Reticulum resilience layer plus an onboard inference scheduler with defined traffic classes and degradation ladder.
Sixteen partner-ready portals
Ferrari, Aston Martin and nine further marques, three roadside groups, a dealer group portal and an independence-safe road-safety portal.
Evidence base
Thirty-plus cited sources, a branded whitepaper, a national economic model and a carbon MRV framework gated behind verification.
Commercial architecture
Twelve-layer revenue model, unit economics, ten-year deployment model, funding plan and risk register.
None of the above was funded. It was built across five years of 18 to 20 hour days, which is roughly 34,675 hours of work. Priced at a conservative £95/hour contractor equivalent, that is about £3.3m of value already inside the business before a single pound of external capital. The pre-seed valuation is not a request for credit for effort; it is a statement that the discovery phase is finished and paid for.
Every number on this page is reproducible
The twin results are computed live by the same engine that runs the machine.
Proof
Digital twin regression results
A fixed matrix of vehicles, load scenarios, seeds and injected faults, executed by the production engine every time this page loads. Deterministic, so any figure here can be reproduced exactly.
Twin sessions executed
0
1,344 independent channel cycles
Fault detection rate
0.0%
120 applicable injected-fault runs
False positives
0.0%
192 nominal runs, zero spurious alerts
End-pressure error
0.00 PSI
Worst case across every completed channel
Mean pressure deficit found
0.00 PSI
90th percentile 3.93 PSI
Sessions needing correction
0.0%
At or above 1 PSI mean deficit
Mean fuel recovered
0.00%
DOE 0.2% per PSI, applied to the deficit found
Mean session duration
0.0 s
95th percentile 7s at simulated control rate
Fault injection matrix
| Injected condition | Runs | Alerted | Journey ready |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominal | 192 | 0% | 100% |
| Slow puncture (RR) | 48 | 100% | 0% |
| Will not stabilise (FL) | 24 | 100% | 0% |
| Valve actuator fault (RL) | 24 | 66.7% | 33.3% |
| Transducer out of range (FR) | 24 | 100% | 0% |
| Severe under-inflation | 32 | 0% | 100% |
Severe under-inflation is a condition, not a fault: the correct behaviour is to correct it silently, which the engine did in 100% of 32 runs at a mean correction of 11.4 PSI. The valve-actuator case is the one open defect: it alerts on 66.7% of applicable runs and is on the pre-prototype fix list. Disclosing it is the point of running a regression suite.
Load-profile selection by scenario
| Scenario | Profile | Mean target |
|---|---|---|
| Solo commute, cold tyres | light | 37.5 PSI |
| Family motorway run | full | 42.3 PSI |
| Holiday, fully loaded with roof box | heavy | 43.9 PSI |
| Warm tyres, mid-journey forecourt stop | full, moderate | 40.9 PSI |
| Winter cold soak | moderate, light | 38.8 PSI |
| Working load, tools and stock | heavy | 43.9 PSI |
| Towing / heavy rear bias | heavy | 43.9 PSI |
| Two-wheel ride-ready check | full, moderate | 40.9 PSI |
The engine never invents a value. It selects an approved profile from the load index, then applies a documented thermal allowance and a hard safety clamp. Identical inputs always produce identical outputs, which is what makes the behaviour auditable by a manufacturer or regulator.
Per-vehicle regression
Mean maximum correction applied per vehicle class across 384 runs. Two-wheel vehicles run a two-channel sequence and are excluded from four-channel fault cases, which is why applicable-run counts differ by class.
Outcomes
Three-tier outcome model
Realistic, probability-weighted and deliberately unglamorous at the base. The base case still returns capital; the mid case is the one being underwritten.
£22.5m
Enterprise value at year 7 on 12,000 active nodes
AiR becomes a respected UK hardware and software business. It sells well, earns real recurring revenue, and is acquired by a tyre maker, roadside group or forecourt operator rather than becoming national infrastructure.
What has to be true
- Two to four dealer or roadside partners deploy; no national forecourt rollout
- Home unit sells modestly; portable and caps carry consumer volume
- Compute monetisation stays internal only, no external workloads sold
- Carbon and data revenue remain at zero
Hardware-led valuation. The business is priced on units and gross profit, not on network effects.
£332.3m
Enterprise value at year 8 on 100,000 active nodes
AiR becomes the default intelligent tyre-care layer in the UK. Recurring revenue dominates, the dataset becomes the reference for road tyre safety, and the first external edge-compute contracts land.
What has to be true
- 2,750+ forecourt anchors and 86,000+ home nodes live
- Fleet SaaS at scale across roadside and commercial partners
- Compute and data services at full modelled monetisation factor
- Network premium applied at 80 percent of the maturity factor
Requires manufacturing execution at volume and at least one national distribution partner. Capital intensity is the binding constraint, not demand.
£3.58bn
Enterprise value at year 10 on 500,000 active nodes
AiR becomes distributed mobility infrastructure: a sovereign edge-compute and communications estate deployed through devices motorists already use, with international licensing on top.
What has to be true
- Home estate becomes the dominant node class and the mesh reaches national density
- External compute and resilience contracts with public and private buyers
- Verified carbon pathway opens after independent MRV review
- International licensing of platform and industrial design
Depends on regulatory acceptance of distributed sovereign compute, sustained capital access and third-party funded deployment rather than balance-sheet funded growth.
Probability-weighted enterprise value across the three tiers is £827.8m. Against a £10m pre-money entry that is a weighted return of roughly 69x before subsequent dilution. Applying the modelled dilution through Series C, an entry position retains about 50 percent of its headline stake, which still clears a venture return threshold in the mid case alone.
Model
Node economics, milestones and the ten-year plan
Both workbooks, reconciled into one view. Switch between the valuation lens and the operating lens.
Live sum-of-the-parts modeller
Implied enterprise value
£338.7m
Same arithmetic as the valuation workbook: recurring revenue at a blended IoT/SaaS multiple, hardware refresh revenue at 1.5x, then an optional strategic premium. No carbon revenue is included.
Strategy
The model's most uncomfortable finding, stated plainly
An investor will find it in ten minutes, so it leads here instead.
Run at full ambition with AiR funding its own hardware growth, the ten-year model calls for billions of pounds of financing to hold a minimum cash balance. That is not a rounding error, it is the central strategic constraint, and hiding it would be the fastest way to lose a credible investor.
AiR should increasingly make other organisations pay for deployment.
Every pound of deployment funded by a partner removes a pound of dilution and adds a pound of enterprise value on the same estate.
Seven routes to partner-funded deployment
Dealer-funded machines
Showroom and workshop units funded by the retailer as a customer-retention asset
OEM-funded owner hardware
Home and portable units bundled into new-vehicle ownership packages
Forecourt purchase or lease
Operator buys or leases the anchor unit for dwell time and service revenue
Roadside partner bundles
Membership hardware funded from member-benefit and retention budgets
Strategic manufacturing capital
Contract manufacturer or tyre-industry partner funds tooling for supply position
Revenue-share deployment
Zero-capex install against a share of session and service revenue
Government and research pilots
Grant and demonstrator funding for evidence-generating deployments
Revenue architecture
Twelve layers on one estate
| Layer | Customer | What AiR sells | Model | Margin | Priority | KPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Hardware | Forecourts, dealers, fleets | TP-4 intelligent tyre station | Sale, lease or revenue share | Medium | Immediate | Units installed |
| 2 Home | Owners and OEMs | Wall-mounted four-channel unit | Retail or OEM bundle | Medium-high | High | Home units active |
| 3 Portable | Owners and OEMs | Guided smart portable pump | Retail or new-car bundle | High | High | Attach rate |
| 4 Smart caps | Consumers, fleets, OEMs | Live tyre telemetry caps | Hardware plus app | High | High | Connected tyres |
| 5 Software | Consumers and fleets | App, history, alerts, pre-journey | Subscription | High | Immediate | ARR per subscriber |
| 6 Fleet | Fleet operators | Compliance and tyre health | Per vehicle per month | High | High | Vehicles managed |
| 7 Maintenance | Forecourts and dealers | Service, calibration, uptime | Annual contract | Medium-high | High | Contract attach |
| 8 Data and API | OEM, tyre, research | Governed aggregated insight | Licence or API | High | Medium | Data revenue |
| 9 Compute | Public and private workloads | Sovereign edge inference | Usage or reserved capacity | High | Later | Compute utilisation |
| 10 Campaigns | Brands and safety bodies | Campaign distribution and analytics | Sponsorship or licence | High | Medium | Campaign revenue |
| 11 Carbon | Verified market participants | Eligible verified reductions only | Credits or certificates | Gated | Gate-controlled | Verified tCO2e |
| 12 Licensing | OEM and international partners | Platform, design and software | Royalty or licence | High | Later | Royalty revenue |
Defensibility
Why a competitor cannot simply write better software
Physical network
Installed sites, mounting, power, connectivity and service relationships cannot be written in software.
Regulatory and safety position
A validated pressure engine and independent review history is years of work, not a feature.
Data accumulation
Longitudinal tyre-health and behaviour data compounds; a new entrant starts at zero.
OEM and brand integration
Marque-specific portals, owner benefits and co-branded hardware are contractual, not copyable.
Distribution relationships
Dealer groups, roadside organisations and forecourt operators consolidate around one supplier.
Network effects
Each new node adds coverage, compute, redundancy and dataset confidence to every existing node.
Execution
The next nine moves and how they are measured
Founder pipeline
George, Ferrari - In progress. First premium OEM validates brand and owner proposition.
Michael Bourne, TyreSafe - In progress. Safety credibility and the government pathway.
Dimitrios Papadakos / Jason Sugden - Not started. Technical tyre validation plus Ferrari synergy.
John Cragg, Sytner Group - Not started. Fast multi-marque distribution route.
Andy Baker / Carl Doran, RAC - Not started. Roadside plus home-servicing fit.
Jakob Pfaudler, The AA - Not started. 14m-driver reach and safety alignment.
5-8 manufacturers - Not started. Physical proof and cost certainty.
Elliot Shaw, National Highways - Not started. National pre-journey pilot and evidence.
Best live lead - Not started. Transforms both valuation and fundability.
KPI tree: now, 90 days, 12 months
Prototype units built
Get hardware real - now 0, 90 days 3, 12 months 50
Independent technical or safety partners
Secure validation - now 0, 90 days 2, 12 months 4
Signed pilot partners
Land distribution - now 0, 90 days 2, 12 months 6
Contracted ARR
Build revenue - now £0, 90 days £100k, 12 months £1m
Active nodes
Build network - now 0, 90 days 10, 12 months 1,000
Completed tyre sessions
Prove usage - now 0, 90 days 1,000, 12 months 100,000
Cash runway months
Protect runway - now 0, 90 days 12, 12 months 18
Capital committed
Fund manufacturing - now £0, 90 days £2m, 12 months £10m
Risk
What could stop this, and the gate that catches it
| Risk | Category | Score | Mitigation | Gate before scaling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Insufficient cash runway | Finance | 20 | Milestone financing, strategic backers, staged tooling, weekly cash review | 12+ months funded before scale capex |
| Four-channel hardware fails or leaks | Engineering | 15 | Bench validation, redundant sensing, per-channel isolation, serviceable modules | Cycle and leak testing passed |
| Data and privacy concerns | Data | 15 | Privacy by design, minimisation, consent, anonymised observatory, DPIA | DPIA plus architecture review |
| Pilot sales cycle slower than expected | Commercial | 16 | Parallel pipelines across OEM, dealer, roadside, forecourt and government | Two signed pilots before scale capex |
| Manufacturing cost exceeds economics | Commercial | 12 | Multi-supplier RFQ, DFM, target BOM, phased tooling | Target gross margin above 35 percent |
| Carbon credits not eligible | Revenue | 12 | Modelled at £0 in base case; activate only after methodology and registry route | Independent MRV opinion |
| Pressure recommendation creates unsafe output | Safety | 10 | Approved data only, deterministic guardrails, independent validation | No public deployment without a validated engine |
| OEM brand or IP misuse | Legal | 12 | All co-branded visuals are proposals; written permission before public use | Brand licence or approval in place |
Value hierarchy
From machine to infrastructure
AiR machine
TodayA four-channel intelligent tyre station that does one job better than anything on a forecourt.
Connected product ecosystem
1,000 nodesForecourt, home, portable and telemetry caps sharing one engine, one app and one account.
National tyre-safety network
10,000 nodesEnough coverage and repeat usage that observed behaviour becomes statistically meaningful.
National data network
50,000 nodesA longitudinal, governed dataset that no research body, insurer or manufacturer currently has.
Sovereign communications network
100,000 nodesA LoRa and Reticulum resilience layer that operates independently of commercial telecoms.
Distributed AI compute network
500,000+ nodesIdle onboard inference capacity sold as approved sovereign workloads, on infrastructure a customer already paid to install.
Diligence
The questions investors ask first
Sources
Where every figure comes from
AiR valuation model, 0 to 1,000,000 nodes
Milestone valuation, node economics, sensitivities - Founder model, Aug 2026
AiR master business, financial and founder model
Ten-year P&L, deployment, funding, unit economics, risk register - Founder model, Aug 2026
AiR Whitepaper v1
£18,400 forecourt capital price, £1,104 platform ARR, £980 maintenance - AiR, 2026
TyreSafe
201 tyre-related killed or seriously injured casualties in 2025; 260+ member organisations - tyresafe.org, checked 18 Aug 2026
US Department of Energy
Approximately 0.2 percent fuel-economy change per 1 PSI average deficit - fueleconomy.gov
Sytner Group
John Cragg, Chief Executive Officer - sytner.co.uk, checked 18 Aug 2026
RAC
Andy Baker, CEO Consumer Roadside; Carl Doran, Growth Director Service, Maintenance and Repair - rac.co.uk, checked 18 Aug 2026
The AA
Jakob Pfaudler, CEO; AA serves more than 14 million UK drivers - theaa.com, checked 18 Aug 2026
National Highways
Elliot Shaw, Chief Customer and Strategy Officer; Richard Pedley, CDIO - nationalhighways.co.uk, checked 18 Aug 2026
Pirelli
UK leadership named in official 2024 material; re-verify before outreach - pirelli.com, checked 18 Aug 2026
This page is scenario modelling and internal analysis. It is not a formal valuation, financial promotion or investment recommendation, and it does not constitute an offer of securities. Named individuals are public-role research targets, not existing commercial relationships unless stated. All co-branded material is proposal only.