Mindgard, the deep-tech startup specialising in security for AI, today announced that IQ Capital and Lakestar have invested as seed funders to bring Mindgard’s unique enterprise platform to market. The London-based firm intends to accelerate growth and expand operations with this £3M funding round.

Mindgard offers the most comprehensive enterprise platform designed to fully address the issues of security for AI. Initially developed under the aegis of Lancaster University, Mindgard harnesses years of PhD-level research in AI security with their automated threat analysis, detection, and response platform already in use by the intelligence community. The Mindgard platform fully integrates with market-leading cybersecurity products, and is a part of the NVIDIA Inception Programme and Microsoft Founder’s Hub

“Today’s businesses are rapidly embracing LLMs and other AI technologies. Although these enterprises understand the need to secure their AI assets, the cybersecurity that worked for them in the past won’t help guard their AI against the next generation of cyber threats.

This leaves companies open to the possibility of AI models and data being stolen or compromised, as well as disabling attacks from bad actors,” said Dr Peter Garraghan, CEO at Mindgard and Professor at Lancaster University. “Currently, Mindgard is deployed by key intelligence organizations around the world to assess, detect, and respond to AI issues and attacks as they happen. With this seed funding, Mindgard now becomes available to enterprises who need to protect their operations against the rapidly-evolving AI threat landscape. We are defining and driving the security for AI space, and believe that Mindgard will quickly become a must-have for any enterprise with AI assets.”

“AI models are an emerging critical attack surface for organizations increasingly seeking to deploy AI,”  said Archie Muirhead, Partner at IQ Capital. “Mindgard provides the most comprehensive solution to manage this surface and reduce risk. With Mindgard’s platform, the complexity of model assessment is made easy and actionable through integrations into common MLOps and Sec Ops tools and an ever-growing attack library. We are happy to back a remarkable founding team spinning out of a world-leading AI security lab at Lancaster.”