From Ballet To Breach Prevention: How A Magician’s Son Raised $4.2M In Seed Funding For His Cybersecurity Startup

figure — 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. Zin Bitar, William Cielen and Alexandre Genest, co-founders of Hilt. (Courtesy photo) 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.