Kyle Hanslovan started Huntress with one goal: to outsmart the hackers he once tracked and studied. Before founding the company, he spent a decade in offensive cyber operations for the U.S. government, writing code to infiltrate foreign networks and extract intelligence. That experience did more than sharpen his technical instincts, it revealed how often attackers slipped through defenses that were supposed to stop them. “They’re really easy to catch,” he’s said. “How are they not being caught?”
He saw an opening among the companies too small to attract top-tier security talent—organizations with real exposure but limited resources. Those teams didn’t need dashboards or complex tools, they needed certainty. Hanslovan built Huntress to deliver it: software that installs silently, monitors continuously, and flags threats before they turn into incidents. “They wanted the whole cooked dish,” not a set of instructions or knobs to configure.
The early days were lean. Hanslovan went unpaid for more than two years, relying on part-time work and feedback from people who had no incentive to spare his feelings. The product had no interface—just an installer and a queue of emails. But customers stuck around because it did exactly what he said it would.
Huntress grew by staying focused. Hanslovan showed up at trade shows with live hacking demos and used every conversation to sharpen the pitch. Education came first; revenue followed. The company has since scaled from $1 million to $120 million in ARR, now serving more than 150,000 businesses and raising over $300 million in venture capital.
Hanslovan has made peace with the long odds. He built Huntress for the companies that no one else was building for—and proved it could work at scale. “Much of my progress has been fueled by people telling me I can’t,” he’s said. “My inner renegade will set out to prove just about anything possible against those two words.”
