Hilt raises USD $4.2 million to spot data theft in real time

Hilt has raised USD $4.2 million in seed funding led by Array Ventures, bringing the San Francisco data-security start-up's total funding to USD $4.7 million.

Verdict Capital, Base10 Partners, Brickyard, Liquid 2 Ventures, Sequel, the Sarah Smith Fund and Alumni Ventures also joined the round. Hilt previously raised a USD $500,000 pre-seed round led by Pear VC, with participation from Cory Levy, Founder of Z Fellows.

It will use the new funding to expand its engineering team and support commercial growth. Hilt monitors how data moves across cloud systems, employee devices and networks, aiming to detect or stop unusual activity in real time.

Its software operates at the kernel level, the core layer of an operating system, where it can observe data movement directly. Hilt describes this approach as "Data Movement Governance", a category designed to address data theft or exfiltration as it happens rather than after the event.

The start-up said it has already attracted early commercial interest from financial-services clients, including one hedge fund that committed a six-figure upfront payment before the product was built.

Hilt also disclosed performance figures from live deployments with financial-services customers. It said kernel-level monitoring reduced latency by an average of 5.26%, with a worst-case latency of 3 microseconds, and that its system classifies an anomalous event in an average of 0.098 seconds.

The business was founded in California in late 2025 by William Cielen and Alex Genest. Cielen, now 19, has an unconventional background spanning ballet, university study and algorithmic trading.

Before moving to San Francisco, Cielen performed as a young ballet artist with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal. He later attended Concordia University at 15 and worked as an algorithmic trader at National Bank of Canada at 18 before leaving to start the company.

According to Hilt's account of its founding, a hackathon at the University of Waterloo helped introduce Cielen to investors. The process led him to leave college and relocate to San Francisco to build Hilt.

Array Ventures led the round at a time when investors have continued to back security companies targeting regulated sectors such as finance, healthcare and legal services. Hilt said those markets are a focus because they combine strict compliance requirements with environments where data moves quickly and the consequences of a breach can be severe.

For Verdict Capital, the investment also marks an early deal for the new fund launched by former General Catalyst investor Niko Bonatsos. Hilt is one of the first companies backed by the vehicle.

"Traditional security tools are rigid. They wait for a human to upgrade them every time the threat changes," said William Cielen, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hilt. "We built a system that evolves on its own and adapts in real time. In environments where data moves in microseconds, that's the only thing that actually works."

Array Ventures said it backed Hilt because of the challenge of spotting data leaving a business at the moment it happens.

"Every enterprise we talk to assumes a breach is coming, yet almost none can see data leaving in the moment it happens. Hilt's AI learns how data normally moves and shuts down anomalies at the kernel in real time. We led this round because Data Movement Governance will be foundational for any regulated business," said Shruti Gandhi, Founder and General Partner at Array Ventures.

Bonatsos said the company's method stood apart from many existing security tools, which often focus on inspecting the content of files or communications rather than monitoring movement itself.

"Hilt is one of the first checks we've written, and we wrote it because the approach is fundamentally different," said Bonatsos. "Most security tools inspect content. Hilt governs movement, at the kernel, fast enough to matter. That's a hard problem, and this is the team to solve it."

Hilt has also drawn support from security veteran Maurice Stebila, who advises the company after holding senior information security roles at EDS/General Motors and Harman by Samsung.

"I've spent my career defending some of the largest enterprises in the world, and the gap has always been speed - by the time most tools flag an exfiltration, the data is already gone," said Maurice Stebila, Advisor at Hilt, Founder of CXO InSyte, and former Chief Information Security Officer at EDS/General Motors and Harman by Samsung. "What makes Hilt different is that it stops the threat at the moment of movement, at the kernel, before the damage is done. It's among the most innovative approaches to data security I've seen, focusing on protecting data where it actually lives."