AI Security Startup Mindgard Bags $30M to Red-Team Vulnerable Models
London and Boston-based AI security startup Mindgard has closed a $30 million Series A funding round led by Album VC, bringing its total raised to approximately $42 million. Existing investors .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital, and Lakestar participated alongside Karma Ventures, signaling strong institutional confidence in the emerging AI red-teaming market. Founded in 2022 as a spinout from Lancaster University, Mindgard operates an automated platform designed to identify, exploit, and remediate vulnerabilities across AI agents, large language models, and downstream applications.
Mindgard's platform functions as a continuous red-teaming engine, mapping the psycho-technical attack surface of AI systems and delivering runtime protection against live threats. The company disclosed that its researchers have already uncovered more than 150 vulnerabilities in widely deployed AI products, including a zero-day remote code execution flaw in the Cursor IDE, alongside security defects in Google Antigravity and ChatGPT. Such discoveries underscore how rapidly adversaries are targeting AI-integrated development environments, and why organizations need proactive tooling rather than reactive patching. Enterprises evaluating their own exposure can start with a free port scanner to identify exposed services that could serve as entry points into AI infrastructure.
CEO James Brear framed the investment around a broader thesis: that AI introduces an entirely new attack surface requiring purpose-built defenses. "We don't just automate attacks. We operationalize expertise, turning the knowledge of leading AI security researchers and offensive security practitioners into the capabilities every enterprise needs to secure their AI," Brear said. The fresh capital will fund scaling across product, engineering, sales, and marketing, with deployment expansion targeted at financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, gaming, and digital services sectors where AI adoption is accelerating fastest.
The funding arrives as enterprise security teams grapple with a surge in AI-specific threats, from prompt injection and model exfiltration to supply chain compromises in third-party AI components. Mindgard joins a growing cohort of well-funded startups, including Zenity ($125M Series C) and Oligo ($50M), competing to define the AI security stack. Organizations hardening their broader attack surface in parallel should run a SSL/TLS checker to confirm encrypted channels are properly configured and use a privacy checkup to surface leaks that AI-powered crawlers and attackers alike could exploit.