From Performance to Cybersecurity: How Will Cielen Built Hilt and Raised $4.2M

Will Cielen's path to founding a cybersecurity company began far from Silicon Valley. Growing up as the child of a magician and acrobat, Cielen spent his early years performing in his father's shows aboard a cruise ship and later in Las Vegas before his family relocated to Montreal when he was 10.

In Montreal, Cielen enrolled in an intensive ballet program, attending dance classes each morning before regular school in the afternoons. "I was rather introverted as a child, but I became extroverted through the unique upbringing," Cielen recalls. By age 15, he had advanced two grades academically, begun college coursework and launched his own website design and development business.

A hackathon visit to Waterloo introduced Cielen to venture capital investors and changed his trajectory. That same week, he made the decision to leave school, abandon an internship in algorithmic trading and relocate to San Francisco to launch what would become Hilt.

Hilt has now emerged from stealth mode to announce a $4.2 million seed funding round aimed at helping organizations identify and prevent unusual data movements, including theft of confidential materials. Array Ventures led the round, with participation from Verdict Capital, Base10 Partners, Brickyard, Liquid 2 Ventures, Sequel, the Sarah Smith Fund and Alumni Ventures. Combined with a $500,000 pre-seed investment led by Pear VC in October 2025, Hilt's total funding now stands at $4.7 million.

Identifying the Market Opportunity

When Cielen arrived in San Francisco, he had committed to cybersecurity as his focus but remained uncertain which specific challenge to address. Prior to founding Hilt, he had attended Concordia University in Montreal and worked as an algorithmic trading intern at the National Bank of Canada.

Cielen invested considerable effort in customer research. "I had to do a lot of customer discovery," he said, "to see what the real problems were, not to build in the dark."

A breakthrough moment came in January when a chief technology officer from a major hedge fund outlined a security challenge affecting its high-frequency trading operations. These systems execute trades in microseconds, leaving minimal tolerance for security software that could introduce processing delays. The hedge fund dangled a potential contract valued between $1 million and $2 million if Hilt could solve the problem, and subsequently paid a six-figure advance before Hilt had even developed the solution.

How Hilt Works

Hilt's software tracks data movement across cloud systems, individual computers and networks by establishing behavioral profiles for users and system resources. The platform identifies suspicious activity even when a user technically has authorization to perform it, and operates without degrading system performance.

Consider a practical example: a late-night login might be routine for an employee with flexible hours. However, if an employee who typically works daytime hours suddenly logs in at midnight immediately after changing their password, Hilt would flag this combination as potentially suspicious.

The system can notify a company's security team to investigate or, in certain scenarios, block the activity in real time. "They don't have to wake up and see that it happens, but we can actually stop it as it happens," Cielen said.

Hilt achieves this by operating at the kernel level—the foundational layer of an operating system—and channeling activity data to graph neural networks, a category of artificial intelligence model designed to spot anomalies. This kernel-level approach provides visibility independent of the various software applications customers use, enabling deployment across diverse infrastructure setups. According to Cielen, measurements from one customer demonstrated that deploying Hilt actually improved cloud system performance.

Expanding Beyond Financial Services

Hilt continues serving the hedge fund that provided its initial breakthrough and has brought on a second high-frequency trading firm as a customer. The company has experienced customer count growth that doubled in the month following an intensified marketing push, though Cielen declined to share specific numbers.

Beyond trading operations, Hilt is attracting interest from neobanks, healthcare organizations, professional services companies and other sectors managing sensitive data. Customers deploy the product within their own systems, maintaining complete data control, and pay annual licensing fees per data collector.

The startup currently employs 11 people, including co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Alex Genest and founding engineer Zin Bitar. Originally headquartered in San Francisco, the team has relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, partnering with investor Brickyard as the company pursues product-market fit.

Cielen indicated that the new capital will focus primarily on recruitment and market development. "The money is very useful for hiring the best people," he said.

Investor Perspective

Shruti Gandhi, general partner at Array Ventures, explained that existing tools in this category typically operate in one of two ways: either attempting to identify sensitive information 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."

Gandhi also highlighted that contemporary data breaches frequently lack the appearance of traditional 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, cited Cielen's personal qualities as his primary motivation for investing. "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 General Catalyst investor who launched Verdict in early 2026 and has also backed Mercor, was equally impressed by Hilt's technical approach. Hilt represented one of Verdict's earliest investments. "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."