Hilt Raises $4.2M Seed Round for Real-Time Cybersecurity Software

Hilt has raised $4.2 million in seed funding as it comes out of stealth, according to Crunchbase News. The company says its software helps detect and stop unusual data activity, including theft of sensitive information. Array Ventures led the round, with participation from 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.

Before building Hilt, William “Will” Cielen performed in his father’s magic shows and trained in an intensive ballet program in Montreal. He skipped two grades, started college at 15 and launched a website design and development business. A hackathon trip in Waterloo introduced him to venture capital investors, and he later dropped out of school, left an algorithmic trading internship and flew to San Francisco to start Hilt. His path is part of Crunchbase News’ series on startup founders from non-technical backgrounds.

Hilt monitors how data moves across cloud infrastructure, computers and networks, then builds behavioral baselines for users and resources. Its software flags unusual activity even when a user has permission to perform the action, and it can alert security teams or quarantine activity as it happens. Cielen said the company works at the kernel, the core of an operating system, and streams activity data to graph neural networks to identify anomalies. The company says this approach gives it visibility across different software environments without slowing customer systems.

Hilt’s early customer activity includes high-frequency trading firms, and the company is seeing interest from neobanks, healthcare businesses, professional services firms and other organizations handling sensitive information. Customers run the product within their own infrastructure 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. Cielen said the new capital will primarily support hiring and building a market presence.

Array Ventures’ Shruti Gandhi said Hilt’s appeal is its ability to find and stop breaches in real time while running inside a customer’s own environment. She noted that breaches increasingly can look like normal activity, such as an employee using valid access, a connected vendor or an AI agent acting within its permissions. Verdict Capital’s Niko Bonatsos said he was drawn to Cielen’s founder profile and Hilt’s approach of watching how data moves at the kernel. The broader takeaway: investors are looking for cybersecurity tools that can respond before sensitive data is already gone.