John Daley

John Daley co-founded HelmGuard with Jack Miller, its chief technology officer, and is its chief executive. The London-headquartered company, whose UK arm was incorporated in October 2024, builds an agentic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platform: AI agents that collect and assess risk signals directly from a company’s systems rather than from questionnaires and templated reports. Daley spent eight years as an executive at Palantir.

A $7.3m seed round

On 9 September 2026 HelmGuard announced a $7.3m (£5.4m) seed round co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First. The money will fund a presence in New York and San Francisco alongside the London headquarters, hiring across engineering and go-to-market, and an agent assurance layer that evaluates how AI agents behave at runtime.

“Most compliance platforms were built to document a process, not to reach a conclusion,” Daley said. “Now they’re using AI to produce those documents faster, which doesn’t help anyone decide anything.”

What customers report

HelmGuard says it works with firms in financial services, insurance, healthcare and industrials, with users across the US, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong and South Africa, and that it cuts assessment time by up to 80%. For one US insurer it assessed 1,250 counterparties in less than a week; the customer then moved off its legacy platform, in a migration HelmGuard’s engineers completed in under 10 days. Callosum, a London AI company selling into regulated industries, uses HelmGuard to design and run its security and compliance program.

The company is also building a Verified Risk Network, in which one organization’s agents answer another’s assurance questions with current, verified claims instead of static documents.

Why it matters to UK buyers

HelmGuard says firms in regulated sectors spend billions of dollars a year compiling and reviewing documentation to manage security and compliance. Research by EY, cited by HelmGuard, found that a third of businesses rank third-party and supply chain risk as a major threat. For UK banks, insurers and the suppliers who answer their due diligence, continuous evidence drawn from source systems could replace much of the annual questionnaire cycle, and the agent assurance work addresses a newer problem: vendors adding AI agents to products that were assessed before those agents existed.

Daley is applying lessons from eight years at Palantir to a part of compliance still run largely on paperwork, and now has the funding to test the approach on both sides of the Atlantic.