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.
Co-founded by John Daley (CEO), a former Palantir executive, and Jack Miller (CTO), HelmGuard is developing a platform that uses specialised AI agents to assess risk information directly from companies' systems. The technology is designed for regulated industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials.
Risk and compliance teams traditionally rely on questionnaires, documentation and manual reviews to assess areas such as third-party risk and security controls. As companies work with growing numbers of vendors and deploy AI systems across their operations, HelmGuard is targeting the challenge of keeping these assessments up to date and linking identified risks with the controls intended to address them.
The platform brings together risk, security and compliance information from company documents and underlying source systems into an interconnected data layer. AI agents then use this information to automate workflows including third-party risk management, control gap assessments and AI agent assurance. The system also provides citations and reasoning traces, alongside 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.
The company is also developing technology for monitoring risks associated with AI agents. Its planned agent assurance layer will evaluate agent behaviour at runtime, while its Verified Risk Network is intended to enable organisations to exchange verified risk information on a continuous basis.
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 support HelmGuard's expansion in the US, including a presence in New York and San Francisco alongside its London headquarters. The company also plans to expand its engineering and commercial teams and further develop its agent assurance technology.
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