HelmGuard, a London startup, has raised $7.3 million in seed funding to replace compliance paperwork with AI agents. The company uses AI agents to check how companies manage security and compliance. Infinity Ventures and Frontline co-led the round, which was announced on September 9. FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital, and Entrepreneurs First also invested in the company.
Co-founders John Daley, the chief executive, and Jack Miller, the chief technology officer, started the company. Daley spent eight years as an executive at Palantir, according to HelmGuard. The round was covered by Tamara Djurickovic for Tech.eu, and Sofia Chesnokova interviewed both founders for Tech Funding News.
HelmGuard works in governance, risk, and compliance, known as GRC. Its platform pulls risk, security, and compliance data from company documents and directly from source systems into one connected network. Specialized AI agents then run the work, including third-party risk management, control gap assessments, and checks on other AI agents. The company says the system shows citations and reasoning traces, and humans stay in the loop, so teams can report to auditors and regulators.
According to Daley, 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. HelmGuard's 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.
The company's platform uses three safeguards against a wrong risk decision. Each assessment carries a confidence score, each conclusion links to a specific source, and a human then reviews the result, depending on how critical the decision is. Customers can require a human check only above a set level of risk, which Miller said no competitor offers.
HelmGuard says its users are spread across the US, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong, and South Africa. For one US insurer, it assessed 1,250 counterparties in less than a week. That customer then moved off its old platform, a migration HelmGuard says its engineers completed in under 10 days. A global telehealth and telecommunications firm used it to cut first response times on customer assurance from days to minutes.
Another customer is Callosum, a London AI scale-up. It hired HelmGuard to design and run its security and compliance programme. According to Callosum co-founder and chief executive Danyal Akarca, HelmGuard's platform accelerated the program build and implementation, giving the company the capability of a mature security organisation and enabling it to compete at massive scale.
Part of the funding will go towards an agent assurance layer, which will evaluate how AI agents behave while they run. HelmGuard is also building a Verified Risk Network, meant to let companies exchange verified, current claims about risk instead of documents. The company cites EY research that found a third of businesses rank third-party and supply chain risk as a major threat.
Investors praised HelmGuard's innovative approach to compliance. Jay Ganatra, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures, said HelmGuard is one of very few teams building for what assurance has to become, rather than making the old process run faster. George Radford, a partner at Frontline, said HelmGuard is building a verification layer, led by a team that's spent years operating inside the exact environments this product now serves.
The founders met through Entrepreneurs First, a London group that recruited each of them. Matt Clifford, one of its co-founders, became HelmGuard's first investor. Daley trained as a lawyer before joining Palantir, where he handled public and private sector deals and oversaw internal security, compliance, and data protection. Miller has a background in AI research, having worked on some of the early large language models developed by OpenAI and Google.
HelmGuard plans to expand in the US, with a presence in New York and San Francisco alongside its London headquarters. It will hire across engineering and go-to-market teams, and aims to raise a Series A round within 12 to 18 months.
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