HelmGuard raises USD $7.3 million for US expansion

HelmGuard has raised USD $7.3 million in a seed round co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline to support its US expansion.

FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First also participated. London-based HelmGuard plans to establish a presence in New York and San Francisco, hire across engineering and commercial roles, and accelerate work on a system designed to evaluate AI agent behaviour during live operation.

The company sells software for governance, risk, compliance and security teams, focusing on regulated industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials. Its platform uses AI agents to gather and assess risk signals from source systems instead of relying on questionnaires, reports and other documents that have long underpinned compliance checks.

HelmGuard was co-founded by John Daley, a former Palantir executive, and Chief Technology Officer Jack Miller. The company argues that many existing compliance tools still centre on paperwork, even when they use AI, giving businesses faster document production rather than a clearer view of operational risk.

Daley said the business is trying to shift assurance work away from static records and toward direct verification of controls, vendors and AI systems. It says this approach can cut assessment cycles from weeks to hours by collecting evidence from underlying systems.

"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," said John Daley, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, HelmGuard.

US push

The funding comes as companies in tightly regulated sectors face growing pressure to track risks across supply chains, software providers and internal AI deployments. HelmGuard says its customer base already spans the US, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong and South Africa, with some clients moving from legacy governance and compliance systems.

According to HelmGuard, one US insurance customer used the platform to assess 1,250 counterparties in less than a week. The company said the project prompted the client to migrate from its previous platform, with the change completed in under 10 days.

Another customer, described as a global telehealth and telecommunications company, used HelmGuard to automate customer assurance work, reducing first response times from days to minutes, according to the company.

Alongside larger companies, HelmGuard says it is working with start-ups that need to satisfy security reviews from prospective buyers. One such customer is Callosum, a London-based business selling AI products into regulated sectors.

"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," said Danyal Akarca, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Callosum.

Agent oversight

A central part of HelmGuard's pitch is that traditional assurance methods struggle to keep pace with AI systems that change frequently and can act with a degree of autonomy. The company is developing what it calls an agent assurance layer to check how AI agents behave at runtime, an issue that has become more prominent as businesses embed AI tools into operational workflows.

HelmGuard is also building a Verified Risk Network, intended to let organisations exchange continuously updated, verified risk claims rather than static documents. The idea is that one company's software agents can answer another company's assurance questions using current information drawn from live systems.

"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," said Jack Miller, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, HelmGuard.

Investors in the round said HelmGuard is targeting a market where established methods of risk review are being tested by faster-moving software and tighter compliance demands. They highlighted third-party risk management and oversight of AI agents as areas where older approaches may no longer be sufficient.

"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," said Jay Ganatra, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Infinity Ventures.

"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," said George Radford, Partner, Frontline.