Hilt has emerged from stealth with $4.2 million in seed funding to help companies detect and stop unusual data activity, including theft of sensitive information. Array Ventures led the round, joined by Verdict Capital, Base10 Partners, Brickyard, Liquid 2 Ventures, Sequel, the Sarah Smith Fund and Alumni Ventures. The financing brings Hilt’s total funding to $4.7 million, including a $500,000 pre-seed round led by Pear VC in October 2025.
Founder’s unusual path to cybersecurity
William “Will” Cielen, Hilt’s co-founder and CEO, grew up performing in his father’s magic shows. The son of a magician and an acrobat, he spent his first five years living on a cruise ship, then five years in Las Vegas. At 10 he moved to Montreal and entered an intensive ballet program, training in the mornings and attending school in the afternoons.
Cielen says he was “rather introverted as a child, but I became extroverted through the unique upbringing.” By 15 he had skipped two grades, started college and launched a website design and development business. He later attended Concordia University and worked as an algorithmic trading intern at the National Bank of Canada. A trip to a hackathon in Waterloo introduced him to venture capital investors; that same week he dropped out of school, quit his algorithmic trading internship and flew to San Francisco to start Hilt.
Hilt’s approach to breach prevention
Hilt’s software monitors how data moves across cloud infrastructure, computers and networks and builds behavioral baselines for users and resources. The product flags unusual activity even when a user has permission to perform an action and can either alert a security team or, in some cases, quarantine the activity as it happens. Cielen said, “They don’t have to wake up and see that it happens, but we can actually stop it as it happens.”
The company works at the kernel, the core of an operating system, and streams activity data to graph neural networks that identify anomalies. Cielen said that kernel-level visibility gives Hilt insight beneath the different software applications customers use and allows deployment across a range of environments. He also said one customer’s measurements showed that deploying Hilt sped up its cloud systems.
As an example of detected anomalies, Hilt points to combinations of events: a user who normally works during the day logging in at midnight and having just changed their password could be flagged as suspicious even if each action alone appears normal.
Traction, customers and growth
A pivotal conversation in January with the CTO of a large hedge fund highlighted a security problem in high-frequency trading operations, where systems trade in microseconds and tolerate minimal added latency. The hedge fund offered a potential contract worth $1 million to $2 million if Hilt could solve the problem, and it paid a six-figure sum upfront before Hilt had built the solution. Hilt continues to work with that hedge fund and has added another high-frequency trading firm.
Cielen said the company’s customer count doubled in the month after a more concerted push to market, though he did not disclose the total number of customers. Beyond trading firms, Hilt is seeing interest from neobanks, healthcare businesses, professional services firms and other companies that handle sensitive information. Customers run the product within their own infrastructure and pay an annual fee per data collector.
Team, relocation and use of funds
Hilt has 11 employees, including co-founder and CTO Alex Genest and founding engineer Zin Bitar. The team, originally based in San Francisco, moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, with investor Brickyard as it works toward product-market fit. Cielen said the new capital will primarily support hiring and building a market presence: “The money is very useful for hiring the best people.”
Investor perspectives
Shruti Gandhi, general partner of Array Ventures, said most tools in this space either “predict what’s sensitive upfront and get it wrong a lot, or they tell you what happened after the data is gone.” She wrote, “Hilt can find and stop these breaches in real time, with accuracy. It also runs entirely inside the customer’s own environment, so nothing leaves the company. For a bank or government entity, that is the difference between proactive vs. reactive response.” Gandhi added that many breaches look like normal activity and noted that as AI agents act autonomously, the problem will grow.
Niko Bonatsos, founder and managing director of Verdict Capital, said he was drawn to invest in Hilt mainly because of its founder: “At Verdict Capital, we back founders who are obsessed, have high velocity and are learning animals. Will exemplifies these traits.” Bonatsos also praised Hilt’s technical approach: “Most security tools look at content: files, signatures, known threats. Hilt looks at how data moves, at the kernel, which is the one place you can’t hide from. Everyone assumed you couldn’t sit that deep without slowing systems down. They did it in live financial environments… Selling security into banks is about as hard as enterprise sales gets, and I watched them do it.”
