Ex-Magician’s Son Secures $4.2M Seed Funding for Cybersecurity Startup

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 began creating cybersecurity software, he performed in magic shows alongside his father.

Raised by a magician and an acrobat, Cielen spent the first five years of his life on a cruise ship before living in Las Vegas for another five years. When he turned 10, his family relocated to Montreal, where he enrolled in an intensive ballet program that required him to spend his mornings dancing and his afternoons attending school.

“I was rather introverted as a child, but I became extroverted through the unique upbringing,” Cielen recalls.

By age 15, he had skipped two academic grades, entered college, and established a website design and development enterprise. A subsequent journey to a hackathon in Waterloo connected him with venture capital investors. During that exact week, he noted that he left school, abandoned an algorithmic trading internship, and flew to San Francisco to launch Hilt.

Today, the startup is emerging from stealth with the exclusive announcement to Crunchbase News that it has secured $4.2 million in seed funding to assist corporations in identifying and halting abnormal data behavior, such as the unauthorized extraction of confidential data.

Array Ventures spearheaded the investment round, with contributions from Verdict Capital, Base10 Partners, Brickyard, Liquid 2 Ventures, Sequel, the Sarah Smith Fund, and Alumni Ventures. This new capital elevates Hilt’s total raised funding to $4.7 million, which includes a $500,000 pre-seed round managed by Pear VC in October 2025.

Finding the problem

Upon his arrival in San Francisco, Hilt co-founder and CEO Cielen had committed to the cybersecurity sector but was still determining the exact challenge to address. His background included attending Concordia University in Montreal and completing an algorithmic trading internship at the National Bank of Canada.

“I had to do a lot of customer discovery,” he said, referencing his outreach to grasp market dynamics and converse with prospective clients, “to see what the real problems were, not to build in the dark.”

A turning point occurred in January when the chief technology officer of a major hedge fund outlined a security issue within their high-frequency trading infrastructure. Because those platforms execute transactions in microseconds, Cielen explained, they leave virtually no margin for security protocols that introduce latency.

The hedge fund proposed a potential contract valued between $1 million and $2 million if Hilt could successfully resolve the issue, according to Cielen. The client then disbursed a six-figure payment upfront prior to Hilt developing the actual solution.

Hilt’s software tracks how data travels across cloud environments, computing devices, and networks, establishing behavioral baselines for both users and resources. It highlights irregular actions—even when executed by authorized users—and maintains that it performs these functions without degrading system performance.

For instance, a late-night login might be routine for a staff member who frequently works late hours. However, if an individual who exclusively operates during daytime shifts suddenly logs in at midnight right after modifying their password, Hilt can flag that specific combination as suspicious.

The platform can notify an organization’s security personnel to initiate an examination or, in specific scenarios, isolate the activity immediately as it unfolds.

“They don’t have to wake up and see that it happens, but we can actually stop it as it happens,” Cielen said.

The company’s methodology involves operating directly at the kernel—the foundational layer of an operating system—and feeding activity metrics into graph neural networks, which are a classification of AI models designed to spot anomalies. Cielen pointed out that this grants Hilt operational visibility underneath the diverse software applications utilized by clients, enabling deployment across varied technical environments.

Furthermore, he noted that performance metrics from a client demonstrated that installing Hilt actually accelerated their cloud systems.

The enterprise maintains its working relationship with the initial hedge fund and has integrated an additional high-frequency trading firm into its client roster, Cielen stated. He mentioned that its customer base doubled within the month following its transition toward a more aggressive marketing strategy, though specific aggregate numbers were withheld.

Hiring and expanding beyond finance

Outside of trading institutions, Hilt is drawing interest from neobanks, healthcare organizations, professional services practices, and other entities handling confidential information. Clients execute the application directly inside their proprietary infrastructure, keeping data ownership under their command, and pay an annual subscription fee based on the number of data collectors.

The organization currently employs 11 people, featuring co-founder and CTO Alex Genest alongside founding engineer Zin Bitar. Though initially established in San Francisco, the group relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, alongside investor Brickyard to drive toward product-market fit.

Cielen indicated that the newly acquired funds will primarily be directed toward expanding the workforce and strengthening market penetration.

“The money is very useful for hiring the best people,” he said.

Investor POV

Shruti Gandhi, general partner at Array Ventures, remarked that most existing tools in this domain typically execute one of two functions—either attempting to forecast sensitive information up front “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 emphasized that modern security breaches do not always resemble conventional 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 at Verdict Capital, noted that his decision to invest in Hilt was driven primarily by its leadership.

“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 launched Verdict during early 2026 and previously supported Mercor, added that he was deeply impressed by Hilt’s technological strategy, confirming it represented one of the initial investment checks written by the Verdict team.

“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.”

Related Crunchbase query:

• Global Cybersecurity Venture Funding In 2026

Illustration: Dom Guzman

?Frequently Asked Questions

01What is Hilt?

Hilt is a cybersecurity startup that helps companies detect and stop unusual data activity and sensitive information theft in real time without slowing down their systems.

02How much funding has Hilt raised?

Hilt has raised a total of $4.7 million, including a recent $4.2 million seed funding round led by Array Ventures and a prior $500,000 pre-seed round led by Pear VC.

03Where is Hilt located?

While originally based in San Francisco, the 11-person team relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, alongside investor Brickyard.

04Who founded Hilt?

Hilt was founded by William “Will” Cielen, along with co-founder and CTO Alex Genest and founding engineer Zin Bitar.