Mindgard Raises $30M to Lock Down Enterprise AI Systems

Jan de Vries · 2026-08-13

AI is everywhere now. It's writing your emails, powering your chatbots, and making decisions in the background. But here's the uncomfortable truth: most companies have no idea how vulnerable their AI actually is. That's the gap Mindgard is trying to close. The Boston and London-based startup just landed a $30 million Series A round (about €26 million) to scale its AI security platform across product, engineering, sales, and marketing. The demand is clearly there, and the company is moving fast to meet it. ### Who's backing this AI security push? Album VC led the round, with participation from Karma Ventures and existing investors like .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital, and Lakestar. That's a solid mix of new money and repeat believers, which usually says something about a company's trajectory. "AI is creating an entirely new attack surface and organisations need a fundamentally different approach to securing it," said James Brear, CEO 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." ### What Mindgard actually does Founded in 2022 by Dr. Peter Garraghan and spun out of Lancaster University, Mindgard helps organizations discover, assess, and defend their AI systems. The company is backed by what it calls the world's largest AI security lab at Lancaster University, and it claims to have built the first platform that can capture and exploit the newly discovered "psycho-technical" attack surface that shows up inside AI models, agents, and applications. In plain English, that means the platform does three things: - **Shadow AI discovery** – finds AI systems that employees are using without IT knowing - **AI red teaming** – attacks your own AI like a hacker would, to find weaknesses - **Run-time AI protection** – monitors and stops attacks as they happen The platform acts like an autonomous red teamer. It uses attacker-style reconnaissance to reveal how adversaries might discover and exploit your AI agents and systems. Then it provides continuous analysis and runtime protection so teams can find, fix, and stop attacks before they cause real damage. ### The proof is in the vulnerabilities Here's where it gets interesting. Mindgard says its platform has uncovered and publicly disclosed more than 150 high-impact security and safety vulnerabilities in widely used AI products. Some of the highlights include a zero-day code-execution vulnerability in Cursor IDE, a trusted-workspace flaw in Google Antigravity, and image-generation guardrail failures in ChatGPT. That's not just academic stuff. These are real vulnerabilities in tools that thousands of companies use every day. "Organisations are moving AI into critical operations without security infrastructure designed for how these systems operate in practice," said Ty Boswell, Partner at Album VC. "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." ### Why this matters right now Every company is racing to deploy AI. But most are doing it without a clear picture of the risks. The intelligence Mindgard gathers from its vulnerability disclosures feeds back into its proprietary knowledge base, which continuously strengthens the platform. It's a flywheel effect that makes the security tool smarter every time it finds something new. The Series A follows rapid deployment across a large number of Fortune 2000 companies and AI innovators in financial services, pharmaceuticals, gaming, digital services, semiconductors, and healthcare. That's a diverse customer base, which suggests the platform is solving a problem that spans industries. If you're responsible for AI security at your organization, this is a space worth watching. The threat landscape is evolving fast, and the tools to defend against it need to evolve just as quickly. Mindgard is positioning itself to be that defense.