- HelmGuard has raised $7.3 million in seed funding to launch AI agents that directly address compliance risks, rather than depending on paperwork.
- The original founders met through an Entrepreneur First programme organised by Matt Clifford, who later became HelmGuard’s first investor.
- In just two months, the team increased its membership from three to ten and intends to raise a Series A round in the next 12 to 18 months.
Frontline Ventures, which previously supported Vanta, a compliance company with a market value of $4.15 billion, has now co-led HelmGuard’s seed financing. In a recent interview with Tech Funding News, HelmGuard’s founders have questioned whether Vanta’s method has actually solved the compliance problem.
HelmGuard, an AI-agent-driven platform for governance, risk, and compliance, often referred to as GRC, has secured $7.3 million in seed financing, with Infinity Ventures and Frontline as co-leads.
From Palantir and AI research to King’s Cross
The founders of HelmGuard have a wide variety of experience in the industry.
John Daley, the CEO, originally trained as a lawyer specialising in technology and spent eight years at Palantir, where he handled deals in both the public and private sectors and oversaw internal security, compliance, and data protection.
Jack Miller, who is the CTO, has a background in AI research. While he was a university student, he worked on some of the early large language models developed by OpenAI and Google. Although he considered pursuing a PhD, he thought the field was advancing too quickly to justify spending years in a laboratory.
Matt Clifford, one of the co-founders of Entrepreneurs First, recruited both founders individually to join a London-based group known as “def/acc”, which stands for defensive acceleration. Clifford thinks that the best way to deal with AI risks is to develop better defensive technology rather than slow down offensive technology, and therefore became HelmGuard’s first investor.
According to Daley, the company was established because of their shared belief in this idea and his time at Palantir.
Decisions over documents
The founders say their approach differs from that of leading compliance automation platforms such as Vanta, Drata, and Secureframe.
Daley explains that those tools create checklists for people to follow, while HelmGuard lets AI agents handle the checklists on their own. “We have this phrase internally: decisions over documents. We want to inform a decision about how your enterprise is actually operating. Because if not, what is the value that that work is providing?,” he said.
Miller adds that the difference lies in the architecture rather than just in the features. He points out that traditional platforms have gradually added on various modules, such as new compliance frameworks or endpoint agents, causing their systems to become so fragmented that it is difficult for AI agents to work with them.
HelmGuard, by contrast, brings together internal compliance, third-party risk, AI governance, agents, employees, and business units into a single graph for its agents to use.
Speaking about what prevents an AI agent from making an incorrect risk decision, Miller referred to three kinds of safeguards: a confidence score accompanying each assessment, a citation system that links each conclusion to a specific source, and human review depending on how critical the decision is. Customers can configure the system so that a human check is required only when the risk reaches a certain level, something Miller stated no competitor currently offers.
The company points to its capacity to scale as proof of this. For one insurance client in the United States, HelmGuard conducted a comprehensive risk assessment covering 1,250 counterparties in under a week. London-based Callosum employed HelmGuard to set up its security and compliance programme from scratch.
Competing with the giant its own investor helped build
A $7.3 million round received approximately ten term sheet offers before HelmGuard decided to select Infinity Ventures and Frontline as co-lead investors, together with FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital, Entrepreneurs First, and a group of angels that, according to Daley, brought “great operational, technical and market expertise”.
The fact that Frontline is involved is significant, as Frontline also has an interest in Vanta, the market leader HelmGuard is competing against.
George Radford, the partner who was in charge of Frontline’s part of the arrangement, views this as being consistent rather than contradictory: “Each of the companies that we support is using agents which make many more decisions, and do so much more quickly, than the workflows that they have replaced. The old assurance model was never designed for a situation in which decisions about what to do are made at runtime.”
As for the wider concept, Jay Ganatra from Infinity Ventures said: “Risk assurance still operates on a model that was created for a slower world in which firms certify once a year, submit the report and then hope that nothing happens. HelmGuard is one of an extremely small number of teams working on what assurance has to evolve into.”
The enterprise GRC software market was worth $72.4 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach $203.7 billion by 2033, with a compound annual growth rate of about 13.7%.
The team has grown from three to 10 people in the last two months. According to Daley, the funding will support three main priorities: hiring, expanding the product to meet growing customer demand, and strengthening their go-to-market efforts beyond the UK and US.
HelmGuard, based in Kings Cross, London, plans to open a US office soon and is aiming for a Series A round in 12 to 18 months
