Mindgard Raises $30 Million to Test AI Systems for Security Flaws
The London-and-Boston startup has already found more than 150 vulnerabilities in popular AI products, including a previously unknown flaw in a widely used code editor. Fresh capital will expand its engineering and sales teams.
Key points
- Mindgard closed a $30 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to close to $42 million.
- Album VC led the round, with Karma Ventures and four existing investors joining.
- The platform has uncovered more than 150 security flaws across popular AI products since the company's founding in 2022.
- Discovered vulnerabilities include a zero-day (a flaw the software maker did not previously know about) in Cursor IDE, a tool developers use to write code with AI assistance.
- Mindgard plans to grow its teams and expand into financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, and semiconductor sectors.
AI security startup Mindgard has raised $30 million in a Series A round. Founded in 2022 out of Lancaster University, the firm now operates from London and Boston and builds tools that deliberately probe AI systems for weaknesses before criminals find them first.
What does Mindgard actually do?
Mindgard runs what the security industry calls red-teaming: it plays the attacker, probing a company's AI products for flaws so those flaws can be fixed. The platform automates that process continuously rather than in a one-off annual audit, mapping every route an attacker could use to manipulate an AI model or application, then watching for new weak spots as they emerge.
Since launch, it's flagged more than 150 vulnerabilities in real AI products, among them a zero-day code-execution flaw in Cursor IDE and security defects in Google Antigravity and ChatGPT. We've tracked Cursor IDE's security exposure since 2 July 2026.
Who put up the money?
Album VC led the Series A. Karma Ventures came in as a new backer alongside four returning investors: .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital and Lakestar. Combined with earlier rounds, Mindgard has now raised close to $42 million in total.
The capital goes toward hiring across product, engineering and sales. Target sectors include financial services, gaming, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors.
"AI is creating an entirely new attack surface and organisations need a fundamentally different approach to securing it," Mindgard CEO James Brear said in the announcement, first covered by SecurityWeek.
Should you worry?
Most people never interact with Mindgard directly. It sells to businesses. But those businesses use AI to handle mortgage applications, medical records and customer-service conversations, and an untested AI system can be manipulated to leak private data or bypass safety rules entirely.
This is the second $30 million AI security raise we've reported in two days: Hush Security closed the same figure on 28 July 2026 to put autonomous AI agents under tighter identity controls. The pattern is telling: investors are no longer treating AI security as a niche. If a company you use is deploying AI in a sensitive area, it's worth asking whether that system has been independently tested.
