HelmGuard co-founders John Daley (left) and Jack Miller.
London startup HelmGuard has raised $7.3m in seed funding. It uses AI agents to check how companies manage security and compliance. Infinity Ventures and Frontline co-led the round, the company said in its funding announcement on 9 September. FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First also invested.
John Daley, the chief executive, and Jack Miller, the chief technology officer, co-founded the company. Daley spent eight years as an executive at Palantir, according to HelmGuard. The round was covered by Tamara Djurickovic for Tech.eu, and Sofia Chesnokova interviewed both founders for Tech Funding News.
What HelmGuard does
HelmGuard works in governance, risk and compliance, known as GRC. Its platform pulls risk, security and compliance data from company documents and directly from source systems into one connected network. Specialised AI agents then run the work. That includes third-party risk management, control gap assessments and checks on other AI agents. The company says the system shows citations and reasoning traces. Humans stay in the loop, so teams can report to auditors and regulators.
Daley set out the pitch in the announcement.
“Most compliance platforms were built to document a process, not to reach a conclusion. Now they’re using AI to produce those documents faster, which doesn’t help anyone decide anything. Our agents go to the source to collect and assess risk signals directly, abstracting away the manual data collection and assessment work that burns thousands of hours annually. This funding lets us bring that capability to far more teams and extend it to governing the AI agents being deployed on other workflows,” he said.
He named the competition in his interview with Tech Funding News. Platforms such as Vanta, Drata and Secureframe create checklists for people to follow, he said. HelmGuard’s agents work through the checklists themselves. “We have this phrase internally: decisions over documents,” Daley told the outlet.
Miller told Tech Funding News that the platform uses three safeguards against a wrong risk decision. Each assessment carries a confidence score. Each conclusion links to a specific source. A human then reviews the result, depending on how critical the decision is. Customers can require a human check only above a set level of risk, which Miller said no competitor offers.
Customers, including Callosum
HelmGuard says its users are spread across the US, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong and South Africa. For one US insurer, it assessed 1,250 counterparties in less than a week. That customer then moved off its old platform, a migration HelmGuard says its engineers completed in under 10 days. A global telehealth and telecommunications firm used it to cut first response times on customer assurance from days to minutes.
Another customer is Callosum, a London AI scale-up. It hired HelmGuard to design and run its security and compliance programme.
“We’re selling into security-aware buyers whose diligence requires a comprehensive program. While we had experience with certification-oriented tools, designing and operationalising a program that made sense for our business would have meant months of hiring and work, slowing our growth. Instead HelmGuard’s platform accelerated the program build and implementation. We now have the capability of a mature security organisation and can compete at massive scale,” Callosum co-founder and chief executive Danyal Akarca said in the announcement.
Checking the AI agents
Part of the money goes to an agent assurance layer, which will evaluate how AI agents behave while they run. HelmGuard is also building a Verified Risk Network. It is meant to let companies exchange verified, current claims about risk instead of documents.
Miller explained the reasoning in the announcement.
“An AI vendor’s risk profile changes with every model update and every new tool its agents can call. As a result, a certification issued months ago describes a reality that our customers cannot rely upon. Regulated buyers need to ask a current question and get a verified current answer, while vendors don’t want to be bogged down re-answering stale questionnaires. The Verified Risk Network makes the unit of assurance a claim assessed directly by an agent, rather than a document, and enables agent-to-agent exchange on a continuous basis,” he said.
The announcement cites EY research that found a third of businesses rank third-party and supply chain risk as a major threat. Of those, 41% have limited or no confidence in their compliance team’s ability to manage it. HelmGuard also said the AI security incidents of this summer involved agents acting without effective oversight. In July, OpenAI disclosed that its autonomous agents had breached Hugging Face.
What the investors said
“Risk assurance still runs on a model built for a slower world where firms certify once a year, file the report and hope nothing changes. That model was already straining under growing regulatory complexity but it fails entirely in a world with software that reasons, plans and acts on its own. HelmGuard is one of very few teams building for what assurance has to become, rather than making the old process run faster, across well-known use cases like third-party risk management and emerging use cases such as agent assurance,” said Jay Ganatra, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures.
George Radford, a partner at Frontline, said: “Every company we back is running agents that make far more decisions, far faster, than the workflows they replaced. The legacy assurance model was never built for something that decides what to do at runtime. HelmGuard is building that verification layer, led by a team that’s spent years operating inside the exact environments this product now serves.”
Frontline has also backed Vanta, the compliance company HelmGuard competes with, Tech Funding News reported. The outlet reported that Radford sees the two investments as consistent rather than contradictory. According to Daley, the round drew about ten term sheets.
How the founders met
Both founders came through Entrepreneurs First, Tech Funding News reported. Matt Clifford, one of its co-founders, recruited each of them. The London group was called “def/acc”, short for defensive acceleration. Clifford then became HelmGuard’s first investor.
Daley trained as a lawyer before joining Palantir, according to Tech Funding News. There he handled public and private sector deals. He also oversaw internal security, compliance and data protection. Miller has a background in AI research. As a student, he worked on some of the early large language models developed by OpenAI and Google, the outlet reported.
What the money is for
HelmGuard plans to expand in the US, with a presence in New York and San Francisco alongside its London headquarters. It will hire across engineering and go-to-market teams. The team grew from three to 10 people in the past two months, Daley told Tech Funding News. The company aims to raise a Series A round within 12 to 18 months.
Other startups have raised money for AI compliance tools this year. Flagright raised $12.5m in June for its financial crime compliance software. The same month, 1Password acquired Apono, which controls what AI agents can do inside company systems.
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