Editor’s note: The following is the latest profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interviews in the series including with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here, Tabs founder Ali Hussain here, Craft founder Ilya Levtov here, GC AI founder Cecilia Ziniti here, and Incredible Health co-founder Iman Abuzeid here.
Before William “Will” Cielen was building cybersecurity software, he was performing in his father’s magic shows.
The son of a magician and an acrobat, Cielen spent his first five years living on a cruise ship, followed by five years in Las Vegas. At 10, he moved to Montreal, where he entered an intensive ballet program, spending mornings dancing and afternoons in school.
“I was rather introverted as a child, but I became extroverted through the unique upbringing,” Cielen recalls.
By 15, he had skipped two grades, started college and launched a website design and development business. A later trip to a hackathon in Waterloo introduced him to venture capital investors. That same week, he said, he dropped out of school, quit an algorithmic trading internship and flew to San Francisco to start Hilt.
Now, the startup is emerging from stealth announcing it has raised $4.2 million in seed funding to help companies detect and stop unusual data activity, including the theft of sensitive information, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
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.
Finding the problem
When Cielen, Hilt’s co-founder and CEO, arrived in San Francisco, he had settled on cybersecurity but was still figuring out which problem to tackle. He had previously attended Concordia University in Montreal and worked as an algorithmic trading intern at the National Bank of Canada.
“I had to do a lot of customer discovery,” he said, describing his efforts to understand the market and talk to potential customers, “to see what the real problems were, not to build in the dark.”
A pivotal conversation came in January, when the chief technology officer of a large hedge fund described a security problem in its high-frequency trading operations. Those systems trade in microseconds, Cielen said, leaving little room for security software that introduces delays.
The hedge fund offered a potential contract worth $1 million to $2 million if Hilt could solve the problem, Cielen said. It then paid a six-figure sum upfront before Hilt had even built the solution.
Hilt’s software monitors how data moves across cloud infrastructure, computers and networks, building behavioral baselines for users and resources. It flags unusual activity, even when a user has permission to do it, and claims it can do so without slowing down the company’s systems.
For example, a late-night login might be normal for an employee who often works late. But if someone who only works during the day suddenly logs in at midnight — and has just changed their password — Hilt could flag the combination as suspicious.
Hilt can alert a company’s security team to investigate or, in some cases, quarantine the activity as it happens.
“They don’t have to wake up and see that it happens, but we can actually stop it as it happens,” Cielen said.
The startup’s approach was to work at the kernel, the core of an operating system, and stream activity data to graph neural networks, a type of AI model, that identify anomalies. Cielen said that gives Hilt visibility beneath the different software applications its customers use, allowing it to deploy across a range of environments.
He also said one customer’s measurements showed that deploying Hilt sped up its cloud systems.
The company continues to work with the hedge fund and has added another high-frequency trading firm, Cielen said. He said its customer count doubled in the month after it began making a more concerted push to market, though he did not disclose the total.
Hiring and expanding beyond finance
Beyond trading firms, Hilt is seeing interest from neobanks, healthcare businesses, professional services firms and other businesses that deal with sensitive information. Customers run the product within their own infrastructure, retaining control of their data, and pay an annual fee per data collector.
The startup has 11 employees, including co-founder and CTO Alex Genest and founding engineer Zin Bitar. Originally based in San Francisco, the team 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,” he said.
Investor POV
Shruti Gandhi, general partner of Array Ventures, said most tools in this space do one of two things — either predict what’s sensitive upfront “and get it wrong a lot, or they tell you what happened after the data is gone.”
“Hilt can find and stop these breaches in real time, with accuracy,” she wrote via email. “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.”
She also pointed out that today’s commonplace breaches don’t always look like attacks.
“They look like normal activity such as an employee using valid access, a connected vendor, or an AI agent doing what it’s allowed to do,” she said. “Hilt connects these actions and detects when normal behavior becomes suspicious. As AI agents increasingly interact and act autonomously, we think this problem will only grow, and we wanted to get ahead of it.”
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,” he wrote via email. “Will exemplifies these traits.”
Bonatsos, a former investor at General Catalyst who founded Verdict in early 2026 and also backed Mercor, said he was also impressed with Hilt’s approach, noting that Hilt was one of the first checks the Verdict team wrote.
“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,” Bonatsos said. “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.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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