HelmGuard, an agentic firm co-founded by a former Palantir executive, has raised a £5.4 million seed round of funding.
The London firm is building AI agents to assess and verify how organisations manage their security and compliance. These collect and assess risk signals directly from source systems, cutting assessment cycles from weeks to hours.
The round was co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First.
The funding will support continued expansion in the US market, including a New York and San Francisco presence alongside HelmGuard’s London headquarters.
John Daley, co-founder and CEO of HelmGuard, spent eight years as an executive at Palantir.
“Most compliance platforms were built to document a process, not to reach a conclusion,” he said. “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.”
HelmGuard already counts companies migrating from legacy 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 firm says. The results prompted a complete migration from its legacy platform, which HelmGuard’s forward-deployed engineers executed in under 10 days.
Another client, a global telehealth and telecommunications firm, is claimed to have automated its 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 at 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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Sheffield University tech spinout secures six-figure funding