Lancaster University spinout Mindgard raises €26 million to protect enterprise AI systems

AI security startup Mindgard, based in Boston and London, has raised €26 million ($30 million) in Series A funding. The company will use the money to grow its product, engineering, sales, and marketing teams to meet growing customer demand.

The funding round was led by Album VC, with support from Karma Ventures and existing investors, including .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, Mindgard was created from research at Lancaster University. The company helps organisations find, assess, and protect their AI systems.

Mindgard says it has developed a platform that can identify and test new security risks in AI models, agents, and applications. Its technology brings together the knowledge of AI researchers and cybersecurity experts to help businesses discover Shadow AI, perform AI red-team testing, and protect AI systems while they are running.

The platform maps an organisation’s AI security risks and looks at how attackers could find and exploit weaknesses. It uses automated security testing to identify potential problems and provides ongoing monitoring and protection to help teams detect and prevent attacks.

Mindgard says its platform has helped find and publicly report more than 150 serious security and safety vulnerabilities in widely used AI products. These include a code-execution vulnerability in Cursor IDE, a trusted-workspace issue in Google Antigravity, and problems with safety controls in ChatGPT’s image-generation system.

The company also says that information from these security discoveries is added to its knowledge base. This helps continuously improve the Mindgard AI Security Platform and strengthen its ability to detect new AI security threats.

“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 funding comes as Mindgard expands its platform among many Fortune 2000 companies and AI-focused businesses. Its customers operate in industries such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, gaming, digital services, semiconductors, and healthcare.