HelmGuard, a London startup that uses AI agents to run risk and compliance assessments, announced a $7.3m seed round on 9 September 2026.
Infinity Ventures and Frontline co-led the round. FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneur First, which incubated the company, also took part. HelmGuard did not disclose a valuation.
The company said it would use the money to expand in the US, hire engineers and go-to-market staff, and build out two products: an assurance layer for AI agents and a network for sharing verified risk information.
“Most compliance platforms were built to document a process, not to reach a conclusion.”John Daley, Co-founder and CEO, HelmGuard
What HelmGuard does
HelmGuard describes itself as an agentic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and security platform. Its AI agents gather risk signals directly from a company's source systems and assess them. The company said this shortens assessment cycles from weeks to hours and cuts assessment time by up to 80%.
Its uses include third-party risk management, assurance of AI agents and assessments of gaps in controls. The platform shows citations and reasoning traces for its conclusions and keeps a human in the loop. HelmGuard targets regulated sectors including financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials, according to SecurityBrief.
Co-founder and chief executive John Daley spent eight years as an executive at Palantir. He founded HelmGuard with Jack Miller, its chief technology officer. Miller argued that a certification issued months earlier no longer describes a situation that customers can rely on, which is why buyers need current, verified answers.
Customers
HelmGuard said it has users in the US, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong and South Africa. One US insurance customer had 1,250 counterparties assessed in under a week and moved off its previous platform in under 10 days, the company said. A global telehealth and telecommunications firm cut its first response time on customer assurance requests from days to minutes.
Callosum, a London AI company, hired HelmGuard to design and run its security and compliance programme. Its co-founder and chief executive, Danyal Akarca, said the company sells to security-aware buyers whose due diligence requires a full programme.
What the money is for
The round will fund offices in New York and San Francisco and hiring across engineering and commercial roles. HelmGuard also plans to speed up work on its agent assurance layer, which evaluates how AI agents behave while they run, and on its Verified Risk Network, through which organisations would exchange verified, current claims instead of static documents.
George Radford, a partner at Frontline, said every company the firm backs is running agents that make far more decisions, far faster, than the workflows they replaced, and that the old assurance model was not built for software that decides what to do at runtime. Jay Ganatra, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures, said HelmGuard was one of very few teams building for what assurance has to become.
Company website: helmguard.ai