HelmGuard raises $7.3M to move compliance beyond paperwork

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.