Mindgard, a Boston and London-based AI security startup, has closed a €26 million ($30 million) Series A financing to scale the company across product, engineering, sales, and marketing in response to significant customer demand.
The round was led by Album VC with participation from Karma Ventures and existing investors .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital, and Lakestar.
“AI is creating an entirely new attack surface and organisations need a fundamentally different approach to securing it. We don’t just automate attacks. We operationalise expertise, turning the knowledge of leading AI security researchers and offensive security practitioners into the capabilities every enterprise needs to secure their AI. This investment will expand our global reach and help make attacker-driven AI security a core part of how organisations implement and manage AI,” said James Brear, CEO of Mindgard.
Founded in 2022 by Dr. Peter Garraghan and spun out of Lancaster University, Mindgard helps organisations discover, assess and defend their AI systems. The company, underpinned by the world’s largest AI security lab at Lancaster University, claims to have created the first platform that successfully captures and exploits the newly discovered psycho-technical attack surface manifesting within AI models, agents, and applications.
Mindgard states that it operationalises the expertise of AI researchers and offensive security practitioners through a security platform that performs Shadow AI discovery, AI red teaming, and run-time AI protection to assess and mitigate risk across models, agents, and applications.
According to the company, the Mindgard platform maps and secures the AI attack surface. Acting as an autonomous red teamer, the company uses attacker-style reconnaissance to reveal how adversaries discover and exploit AI agents and systems, exposing safety and risk implications. It also offers continuous analysis and runtime protection to help teams find, fix, and stop attacks before real-world impact.
The company reported that its platform has helped uncover and publicly disclose more than 150 high-impact security and safety vulnerabilities in widely used AI products. These findings include a zero-day code-execution vulnerability in Cursor IDE, a trusted-workspace flaw in Google Antigravity, and image-generation guardrail failures in ChatGPT.
The firm also highlighted that the resulting intelligence augments the company’s proprietary knowledge base, which continuously strengthens the Mindgard AI Security Platform.
“Organisations are moving AI into critical operations without security infrastructure designed for how these systems operate in practice. Mindgard has translated deep research and elite offensive-security expertise into a continuously evolving capability that enables enterprises to stay ahead of emerging AI threats. We believe this team can define the AI security category,” said Ty Boswell, Partner at Album VC.
The Series A follows the accelerated deployment of Mindgard across a large number of Fortune 2000 companies and AI innovators in financial services, pharmaceuticals, gaming, digital services, semiconductors, and healthcare.