HelmGuard Raises $7.3M Seed Funding to Modernize GRC with AI Agents That Verify Risk in Real Time

• HelmGuard, the agentic GRC and security platform, has raised $7.3M in a seed round co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline.
• HelmGuard’s AI agents assess and verify how organizations manage their security and compliance, replacing manual box-ticking with actionable, continuous decision support.
• The platform serves security and compliance teams in regulated sectors, including financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials.
• The round will fund further U.S. expansion and hiring, acceleration of an agent assurance layer that evaluates AI agent behavior at runtime, and enhancement of HelmGuard’s Verified Risk Network, which replaces exchanged documents with continuously verified claims.

New York, 9 September 2026 – HelmGuard, an AI-powered governance, risk, compliance (GRC) and security platform founded by a former Palantir executive, has announced the close of a $7.3 million seed funding round. The investment was co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with additional backing from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First.

The company has built AI agents that gather and evaluate risk signals directly from an organization’s source systems, enabling security and compliance assessments to be completed in hours instead of weeks.

The new capital will be used to expand HelmGuard’s footprint across the U.S., including growing teams in New York and San Francisco, hiring across engineering and commercial functions, and accelerating development of its agent assurance capabilities, which monitor AI agent behavior during runtime.

Organizations operating in highly regulated industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrial sectors spend billions each year managing security and compliance through documentation-heavy processes. Traditional GRC platforms are largely centered around questionnaires, reports and checklists, prioritizing documentation over operational risk decisions. While many vendors now use AI to automate paperwork creation, HelmGuard argues those systems still fall short in helping organizations understand control effectiveness, vendor risk or AI agent behavior in real time.

HelmGuard approaches the problem differently by combining fragmented security, compliance and risk information into a unified intelligence network. The platform connects unstructured documents with live integrations from operational systems, then deploys specialized AI agents to automate workflows including third-party risk assessments, control gap analysis and agent assurance. The results are consolidated into a single enterprise-wide risk view, supported by citations, reasoning trails and human oversight to provide evidence suitable for auditors, regulators and internal stakeholders.

HelmGuard says organizations across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Hong Kong and South Africa have already migrated from legacy GRC platforms to its system. One U.S.-based insurance company completed risk assessments for 1,250 counterparties in under a week before transitioning entirely to HelmGuard, with the migration completed in less than 10 days by the company’s engineering team. Another global telehealth and telecommunications customer automated its customer assurance process, reducing initial response times from several days to just minutes.

Beyond enterprise customers, HelmGuard is also working with fast-growing startups seeking scalable, AI-driven security assurance. London-based AI company Callosum partnered with HelmGuard to build and manage its security and compliance program while selling AI technologies into regulated markets.

John Daley, co-founder and CEO of HelmGuard, who spent eight years as an executive at Palantir, said: “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.”

Danyal Akarca, co-founder and CEO at Callosum, said: “We’re selling into security-aware buyers whose diligence requires a comprehensive program. While we had experience with certification-oriented tools, designing and operationalizing 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 organization and can compete at massive scale.”

The company says its platform is arriving as enterprises face increasing pressure from evolving third-party and AI-related risks. According to EY research, one-third of businesses identify third-party and supply chain risk as a significant concern, while 41% report limited or no confidence in their compliance teams’ ability to manage those risks. As software vendors increasingly embed AI agents into existing products, organizations also need assurance mechanisms that reflect continuously changing systems rather than static certifications issued months earlier.

HelmGuard positions its AI agents as the assurance layer for this new environment, continuously collecting evidence and evaluating risks within defined scopes. The platform’s Verified Risk Network is designed to replace static document exchanges between organizations with continuously verified claims, allowing companies to respond to assurance requests using live, agent-generated evidence across vendor, customer and portfolio relationships.

Jack Miller, co-founder and CTO of HelmGuard, said: “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.”

Jay Ganatra, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures, said: “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.”

George Radford, partner at Frontline, said: “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.”