Fintech startup Helmguard raises £5.4m led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline
This article covers Helmguard, a fintech startup, which has raised £5.4m in a seed funding round to develop AI agents for continuous risk verification and to fund US expansion and hiring. The development aims to shorten compliance and third-party diligence cycles from weeks to hours and to support regulated organisations seeking continuous, machine-readable assurance of vendor and AI-related risk.
HelmGuard, a fintech startup, has raised £5.4m in a seed funding round to develop AI agents that gather and verify risk signals directly from source systems, aiming to cut weeks-long compliance assessments to hours and replace static paperwork with continuously verified claims. The round will fund US expansion, hiring and work on an agent assurance layer that evaluates agent behaviour at runtime.
Why it matters
Organisations in regulated industries spend large amounts of time and money compiling documentation to satisfy auditors and regulators. That paper- and questionnaire-driven model struggles to keep up with rapid software changes and the emergence of agentic tools that act and adapt at runtime. HelmGuard’s approach seeks to shift assurance from periodic certification to continuous verification, which could change how firms manage third-party and AI-related risk.
The problem is practical as well as regulatory: EY research cited in the announcement finds many businesses view third-party and supply chain risk as a major threat, while large numbers lack confidence in their compliance teams’ ability to manage it. Continuous, machine-readable claims could reduce frictions between buyers and vendors and shorten diligence cycles.
Inside the product
HelmGuard links unstructured documentation and direct integrations with source systems into a single network and uses specialised AI agents to automate workflows such as third-party risk management, control gap assessments and agent assurance. The platform surfaces reasoning traces and citations and keeps humans in the loop so teams can act on verified findings rather than produce additional paperwork.
A core feature is the Verified Risk Network, which allows agent-to-agent exchange of verified claims between organisations rather than exchanging static documents. The company also plans an agent assurance layer that observes agent behaviour at runtime and evaluates whether an agent is operating within expected boundaries.
Customers include firms in financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials across the US, Canada, UK, Hong Kong and South Africa. The announcement gives examples of operational impact: HelmGuard ran a full risk assessment of 1,250 counterparties for a US insurer in less than a week and migrated that client from a legacy platform in under 10 days. A global telehealth and telecommunications client reduced first-response times from days to minutes.
In the announcement, Danyal Akarca, co-founder and CEO of 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 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.
Who are the investors?
The £5.4m seed round was co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First. Entrepreneurs First also incubated HelmGuard and remains listed as a backer.
Infinity Ventures and Frontline position the investment as a bet on a verification layer for assurance that keeps pace with real-time software and agent updates. The round will finance expansion in the US—HelmGuard plans presences in New York and San Francisco in addition to its London headquarters—plus hiring across engineering and go-to-market teams and further development of agent assurance capabilities.
In the announcement, 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.
In the announcement, 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.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of fintech venture capital firms in the UK
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Founder perspective
John Daley, co-founder and CEO of HelmGuard and a former Palantir executive, frames the product as a move from documentation to decision support: he argues that faster document production does not equate to better decision-making and that agents should collect signals directly from source systems.
In the announcement, John Daley, co-founder and CEO of HelmGuard, 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.
Jack Miller, co-founder and CTO, highlights the instability of vendor risk profiles as models and tools change, and describes the Verified Risk Network as a way to make claims the unit of assurance.
In the announcement, 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.
The bigger picture
HelmGuard’s seed raise points to two trends across the UK and broader markets: first, an appetite among fintech and enterprise security buyers for tools that produce operationally useful assurance rather than faster paperwork; second, investor interest in startups building guardrails and verification for agentic systems. The company’s US push follows a common path for London-founded enterprise security and compliance startups seeking larger commercial customers.
The deal also highlights how incubation programmes and specialist fintech investors continue to funnel capital into companies attempting to rewire legacy enterprise processes. If HelmGuard’s claims of shorter assessment cycles translate to widespread adoption, buyers, vendors and regulators may need to reconsider how assurance is documented and exchanged.
This funding round adds to a broader wave of UK-founded security and compliance startups that are reframing assurance for AI and agentic software across Europe and North America.
They've invested in Helmguard
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 FinTech Collective( ) NYC, US  | ||||
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