A London startup founded by the creator of safety app Path is betting that the cameras and sensors already deployed across Europe’s transport hubs, stadiums, and power stations are gathering dust when they matter most.

In the first week of February 2026, anarchists severed electrical cables near Bologna on the opening day of the Milan–Cortina Winter Olympics, stranding thousands of travellers across northern Italy.

That same month, the Vulkangruppe,  a far-left German extremist group with a fifteen-year record of infrastructure attacks, brought down the Lichterfelde power station in Berlin, cutting electricity to around 45,000 homes in temperatures well below freezing. One elderly resident died.

The previous September, a ransomware attack on aviation IT provider Collins Aerospace caused widespread disruption at Heathrow, Brussels, and Berlin airports, forcing airlines to revert to manual check-in processes across the continent.

Three incidents, three different threat actors, three different attack vectors. What they share is this: in each case, organisations responsible for public safety found themselves scrambling to understand, in real time, what was happening and where.

That gap, between what surveillance infrastructure sees and what operators can actually do with the data during an unfolding incident, is the problem a London startup called Augur is trying to close.

The company announced today that it has raised $15 million in a seed round led by Plural, the early-stage European fund co-founded by the founders of Wise, Skype, and Songkick, with additional participation from First Kind, SNR, Flix, and Tiny VC.

Harry Mead, who serves as CEO, is not an obvious fit for the defence-adjacent security sector. Before Augur, he ran restaurants and then retrained in coding to build Path Community, a personal safety app, launched in December 2021, that let users share their journey with trusted contacts and send automatic alerts if they deviated significantly from their route.

The app attracted enough attention to earn Mead a personal letter of thanks from then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a Points of Light award from the government. The problem Path was trying to solve, people feeling unsafe in public spaces, and the infrastructure around them failing to help, is essentially the same problem Augur is addressing at a much larger scale.

Alongside Mead, the company’s founders include Imran Lone as chief technology officer and Stefan Kopieczek as head of engineering.

Both are described in company materials as Palantir alumni, bringing what Augur says is nearly two decades of combined experience working with European governments, defence organisations, and public-sector operators on complex, data-driven security challenges.

Since launching in 2024, the company has grown to 30 people in London.

The investors and their framing

Plural’s Khaled Helioui led the investment. Helioui is a co-founder and partner of the fund, whose other co-founders include Taavet Hinrikus of Wise and Sten Tamkivi of Skype, and has previously led Plural’s investment in Helsing, the European defence AI company. His public statement on the Augur deal was notably geopolitical in tone, even by the standards of a European defence-tech investment round.

“When it comes to protecting our people and critical infrastructure, we cannot afford to be as complacent and naive as we were in protecting Ukraine,” Helioui said. “The new focus on grey zone warfare and domestic sabotage is not a threat we are currently equipped to contain.”

The subtext is clear. Plural, which positions itself as a fund willing to back companies addressing systemic risks, has made a bet that the European market for critical infrastructure security technology is about to expand sharply.

The bet is not an unreasonable one. Western security research organisations, including IISS and CSIS, have documented that state-linked sabotage attacks on European infrastructure roughly tripled between 2023 and 2024, targeting transport networks, energy facilities, and communications infrastructure.

Martyn’s Law, formally the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, named after Martyn Hett, who died in the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, received Royal Assent in April 2025.

With an implementation window of at least 24 months, venues and operators across the UK face new statutory duties around threat assessment and security measures. Augur is pitching directly into that compliance pressure.

The harder question

Whether Augur’s technology actually works in the environments it is targeting is a question the company has not yet had to answer publicly. It says it has begun deployments with “major UK infrastructure and venue operators” but has not named them.

Critical infrastructure operators and government bodies are notoriously slow procurement clients. Their reluctance to move quickly is partly rational;  the consequences of a security system failing in a live incident are severe, and partly institutional.

Winning their trust requires a combination of technical credibility, regulatory compliance, and relationship-building that takes time to accumulate.

The $15 million will be used to accelerate product development and expand deployments. The company’s pitch, stripped to its essentials, is that it can deliver meaningful improvement in situational awareness without asking clients to replace their existing hardware or compromise on privacy.

If it can demonstrate that in live deployments, the market it is addressing is large and, increasingly, legally mandated. If it can’t, the cameras will keep recording, and operators will keep scrambling.