HelmGuard secures $7.3M to modernise risk and compliance with AI
London-based governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and security startup HelmGuard has raised $7.3 million in seed funding to expand its platform for automating risk and compliance assessments. The round was co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First.
Founded by John Daley, CEO and former Palantir executive, and Jack Miller, CTO, HelmGuard is building a platform that uses specialised AI agents to assess risk data directly from a company’s systems. The technology is designed for regulated sectors such as financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials.
Traditionally, risk and compliance teams depend on questionnaires, documents and manual reviews to evaluate areas such as third-party risk and security controls. With businesses managing more vendors and increasingly deploying AI across their operations, HelmGuard aims to make these assessments more continuous and connect identified risks with the controls designed to manage them.
The platform combines risk, security and compliance data from company documents and underlying systems into a connected data layer. Its AI agents can then automate processes such as third-party risk management, control gap assessments and AI agent assurance. The platform also provides citations and reasoning traces, along with human oversight, to support internal reviews and reporting to auditors and regulators.
John Daley, co-founder and CEO of HelmGuard, said many existing compliance platforms were designed primarily to document processes rather than support operational decisions. He said the company's approach is intended to reduce the manual work involved in gathering and reviewing risk information:
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.
HelmGuard is also developing technology to monitor risks linked to AI agents. Its planned agent assurance layer will assess agent behaviour in real time, while the Verified Risk Network aims to help organisations continuously share and exchange verified risk information.
As AI systems evolve through model updates and access to new tools, their risk profiles can change, making periodic certifications less representative of how they currently operate. Jack Miller, co-founder and CTO of HelmGuard, said this creates a need for continuous assessment:
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.
The funding will help HelmGuard expand its US operations, with a presence planned in New York and San Francisco alongside its London headquarters. The company also plans to grow its engineering and commercial teams while continuing to develop its agent assurance technology.