HelmGuard, an agentic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platform co-founded by a former Palantir executive, has secured a $7.3 million seed round to automate security and compliance assessments. The investment was co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First. The London-based company uses AI agents to collect and assess risk signals directly from source systems, reducing assessment cycles from weeks to hours.
Why Legacy Assurance Falls Short
Firms in regulated sectors such as financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials spend billions of dollars annually compiling and reviewing documentation to manage security and compliance. Many existing platforms remain document and process oriented, focused on questionnaires, templated reports and checklist completion rather than operational decision-making. Even AI-powered tools that generate paperwork faster do not clarify the relationship between a risk and a mitigating control or whether an AI agent is behaving as it should.
Building an Interconnected Risk Data Layer
HelmGuard takes a different approach by unifying fragmented risk, security and compliance information into a single interconnected network. The platform draws on unstructured data and documentation as well as direct integrations with source systems, then deploys specialised AI agents to automate workflows such as third-party risk management, agent assurance and control gap assessments. Transparent citations, reasoning traces and human-in-the-loop mechanisms provide a defensible basis for teams reporting to internal stakeholders, auditors and regulators.
Leadership Perspective
John Daley, co-founder and CEO of HelmGuard, spent eight years as an executive at Palantir before founding the company. He said most compliance platforms were built to document a process rather than reach a conclusion, and that using AI to produce documents faster does not help anyone decide anything. According to Daley, HelmGuard agents go to the source to collect and assess risk signals directly, removing the manual work that burns thousands of hours annually.
Early Customer Results
HelmGuard already counts companies migrating from legacy GRC tools among its customers, with users across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and South Africa. One US-based insurance customer used the platform to perform a full risk assessment of 1,250 counterparties in less than a week, prompting a complete migration from its legacy platform in under ten days. A global telehealth and telecommunications firm has automated its customer assurance process, reducing first response time from days to minutes.
Continuous Assurance for AI Agents
The company is also developing an agent assurance layer that evaluates AI agent behaviour at runtime, recognising that risk profiles change with every model update and new tool access. Its Verified Risk Network is designed to enable organisations to exchange verified risk information continuously, replacing static documents with claims assessed directly by agents. Co-founder and CTO Jack Miller said this approach allows regulated buyers to ask current questions and receive verified current answers without vendors repeatedly responding to stale questionnaires.
Investor Backing and Market Context
The funding comes as research and industry events highlight weaknesses in traditional assurance models. EY research found that a third of businesses rank third-party and supply chain risk as a major threat, while 41 percent of those have limited or no confidence in their compliance team's ability to manage it. Investors argue that HelmGuard is building for a world where software reasons, plans and acts on its own, rather than simply making the old certification process faster.
The new capital will support HelmGuard's continued expansion in the United States, including a presence in New York and San Francisco alongside its London headquarters. The company also plans to hire across engineering and go-to-market teams and accelerate development of its runtime agent assurance technology. By moving risk assurance from periodic documentation to continuous, agent-led verification, HelmGuard aims to give security and compliance teams the ability to act on decisions rather than produce more paperwork.