Cytix raises £5.1M to manage the security risk of AI-written code

Cytix, a Manchester cybersecurity startup, has raised £5.1M, about $7M, in a Series A round led by Northern Gritstone, with participation from existing investors Auriga Cyber Ventures and NPIF II PXN Equity Finance. The company builds what it calls a change risk management platform, and it is aimed squarely at a problem that AI is making bigger by the month.

The problem is speed. As teams lean on AI-assisted coding and agentic workflows to ship software, the volume of changes flowing into live systems is climbing far faster than human security review can keep up with. Cytix sits in that gap: it continuously monitors every change a business makes, works out the risk that change introduces, decides how it should be handled, and validates that it was, leaving an audit-ready record behind. The company distributes the software directly and through managed-service partnerships with NCC Group and KPMG.

Founded in 2022 by Ben Armstrong, who leads it as chief executive, and colleagues, Cytix is a useful example of a fast-emerging category: companies built to govern the risks that AI-accelerated software creates, rather than to build the AI itself. The lead investor is telling, too. Northern Gritstone backs science and technology spun out of the North of England’s universities, and a raise like this is a small marker of a deep-tech cluster forming well outside London.

It is an early round for a company selling into cautious buyers, in enterprise and regulated sectors where governing change is a compliance obligation as much as a security one. But the thesis is a clean one, and increasingly hard to argue with: the more code AI writes, the more someone has to watch what all that code is quietly changing.