Mindgard, the Lancaster University spinout building offensive security tooling for artificial intelligence, has closed a $30m (£22.2m) Series A led by Album VC, with Karma Ventures joining alongside existing backers .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital and Lakestar.
Mindgard sells software that probes AI systems for weaknesses. The platform covers what the company calls shadow AI discovery, continuous red teaming and real-time threat protection, scanning AI models, autonomous agents and enterprise applications for vulnerabilities before attackers find them.
The company was spun out of Lancaster University and now runs dual headquarters in London and Boston, giving it a foot in both the UK research base it emerged from and the larger US enterprise security market it is chasing.
The round was led by Album VC, with Karma Ventures taking part as a new investor. They were joined by existing shareholders .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital and Lakestar, all of which returned to the cap table for the Series A. Terms of the valuation were not disclosed.
The presence of the incumbents in the new round points to a supportive rather than corrective financing, with early backers doubling down rather than being diluted out. IQ Capital and Lakestar in particular have been active in UK deep tech, and their continued participation lends the round a degree of insider conviction.
Mindgard positions itself against a fast-emerging category. The company said its platform has been used to publicly disclose more than 150 high-impact AI safety and security vulnerabilities in widely used tools, including zero-day flaws in the Cursor IDE and Google Antigravity, and guardrail bypasses in OpenAI's ChatGPT.
"AI is creating an entirely new attack surface and organisations need a fundamentally different approach to securing it," said James Brear, chief executive of Mindgard. "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."
Ty Boswell, a partner at Album VC, framed the investment as a bet on category leadership. "Organisations are moving AI into critical operations without security infrastructure designed for how these systems operate in practice," he said. "We believe this team can define the AI security category."
The raise lands as enterprises rush generative AI into production faster than they can secure it, opening a market for tooling that tests models and agents the way penetration testers probe conventional software. For a business rooted in UK academic research, the challenge now is converting that early vulnerability-disclosure record into recurring enterprise revenue on both sides of the Atlantic.
*Original source: UKTN
