In this article
Summary
HelmGuard's AI agents assess and verify how organisations manage their security and compliance, replacing manual box-ticking with actionable, continuous decision support
The platform serves security and compliance teams in regulated sectors, including financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials
The round will fund further US expansion and hiring, acceleration of an agent assurance layer that evaluates AI agent behavior at runtime and enhancement of HelmGuard's Verified Risk Network, which replaces exchanged documents with continuously verified claims
HelmGuard, the agentic GRC and security platform, has raised $7.3M in a seed round co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline
London, 9 September 2026
HelmGuard, the agentic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and security platform co-founded by a former Palantir executive, today announced a $7.3M seed round, co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital, and Entrepreneurs First. The company's AI agents collect and assess risk signals directly from source systems, cutting assessment cycles from weeks to hours.
The funding will support continued expansion in the US market, including a New York and San Francisco presence alongside HelmGuard's London headquarters, hiring across engineering and go-to-market, and accelerated development of an agent assurance layer that evaluates AI agent behavior at runtime.
Why Legacy Assurance Falls Short
Firms in regulated sectors, such as financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials, spend billions of dollars annually compiling and reviewing documentation to assess and manage their security and compliance. The legacy platforms they use to assist them are document- and process-oriented, focused more on questionnaires, templated reports and checklist completion than operational decision-making. While other platforms now use AI to generate and process paperwork faster, they still can’t help users understand the relationship between a risk and a mitigating control, whether a vendor is safe to rely upon, or if an agent is behaving as it should.
HelmGuard takes a different approach by unifying fragmented risk, security and compliance data into a single interconnected network drawing on unstructured data and documentation as well as direct integration with source systems. The platform then uses specialised AI agents to automate workflows such as third-party risk management, agent assurance and control gap assessments and synthesise the results into a single, firm-wide view. Transparent citations, reasoning traces and human-in-the-loop mechanisms provide a defensible basis on which teams can operate and report to internal and external stakeholders, auditors and regulators.
John Daley, co-founder and CEO of HelmGuard, who spent eight years as an executive at Palantir, said:
“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.”
John Daley
Customers
HelmGuard already counts companies migrating from legacy GRC tools among its customers, with users across the US, Canada, UK, Hong Kong and South Africa. For one US-based insurance customer, HelmGuard performed a full risk assessment of 1,250 counterparties in less than a week. The results prompted a complete migration from their legacy platform, which HelmGuard’s forward-deployed engineers executed in under 10 days. Another client, a global telehealth and telecommunications firm, has automated their customer assurance process with HelmGuard bringing first response time down from days to minutes.
In addition to large enterprises, HelmGuard is partnering with high-growth startups to deliver an agent-led assurance mechanism that can scale as quickly as their needs. Callosum, a London-based scale-up selling advanced AI technologies into regulated industries globally, engaged HelmGuard to design and operate its security and compliance program.
Danyal Akarca, co-founder and CEO of Callosum, said:
“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.”
Danyal Akarca
HelmGuard's approach arrives as document-based assurance falls behind the pace of change inside enterprises. EY research found that a third of businesses rank third-party and supply chain risk as a major threat, while 41 percent of those have limited or no confidence in their compliance team's ability to manage it. At the same time, the vendors firms already rely on are embedding agentic capabilities into products that were diligenced long before AI was part of the offering, meaning that vendor risk underwritten at purchase no longer describes what is actually running today. Meanwhile, the AI security incidents that made headlines this summer involved agents acting without effective oversight, even as enterprises deploy agents of their own into workflows that used to be run manually.
Agents on the assurance side
HelmGuard's answer is to put agents on the assurance side of the equation: collecting evidence and assessing risk under defined scope, giving firms a continuous and scalable way to link counterparties and agents into a first-party view of risk that supports operational decision-making. Its Verified Risk Network extends this between organisations so that rather than exchanging static documents, a company's agents can answer another's assurance questions with verified, current claims, cutting the cost of managing risk across any counterparty relationship, from software vendors to portfolio companies.
Jack Miller, co-founder and CTO of HelmGuard, said:
“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.”
Jack Miller
What our investors say
Jay Ganatra, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures, 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.”
Jay Ganatra
George Radford, 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.”
George Radford
About HelmGuard
HelmGuard is the agentic GRC and security platform that replaces manual, document-based risk assessment with AI agents that collect, analyse and verify risk signals directly, letting security and compliance teams act on decisions rather than produce more paperwork. HelmGuard is already used by firms in financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials globally, cutting assessment time by up to 80%. Having been incubated by Entrepreneur First, the company is backed by Infinity Ventures, Frontline, FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and and Entrepreneurs First.
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