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Managed threat detection sold through IT service providers to businesses that can't hire security staff, now just shy of $120M in annual revenue.
150,000+ businesses protected · first $5M with zero ads
“Don't give me a tool”: small-business IT providers told Kyle Hanslovan they wanted the whole cooked dish, not ingredients. Huntress sold one narrow promise, catching hackers hiding with persistent access, and reached its first $5M without a single ad.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Huntress sells managed cybersecurity software and services to businesses that cannot hire dedicated security staff. Founder Kyle started the company in 2015 after working as a hacker for the US government with the NSA. He saw that smaller organizations lacked the budgets and expertise available to large enterprises, then spent four or five months talking with prospects and refining the target customer. Early customer calls helped him learn that very small businesses often did not want another configurable tool; they wanted a complete, managed outcome. Huntress focused on businesses below the large-enterprise market and built a product that could be deployed with little configuration. In the interview, Kyle says Huntress ended the latest year just shy of $120 million in revenue, had close to 500 teammates, and served more than 150,000 businesses. He also reports over $300 million raised across financing instruments. The founder says the first $5 million came without advertising, using direct demand capture and education-led demand generation.
Kyle Hanslovan started with a guess: about 35 vendors already served the Fortune 500, so he aimed below them. Over four or five months and roughly a hundred calls, he learned his first targets were too small, some with ten computers and no IT team at all.
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“…just ended the year uh just a tad shy of about 120 million in revenue and we're real close to about 500 teammates fully remote awesome and you have raised I…”
1:14 · hear it in the video“…I went from 5 3 million in Revenue sorry 1.5 to 5 million in Revenue in about a year wow and you can imagine at that point everybody was like oh…”
51:53 · hear it in the videoData credibility: Founder Kyle Hanslovan states, in a SaaS Club interview, just under $120M revenue for the latest year, about 500 employees, 150,000+ businesses protected, and over $300M raised. The year-by-year growth figures and early funding amounts are his own recollection (he hedges with "something like that"). No filings or dashboards are shown.
The first dollar arrived slowly. Kyle admits he was afraid to ask for money because he did not yet believe in the product; one early MSP finally told him he had better send an invoice if he wanted to be paid.
Growth became repeatable once Kyle stopped selling one MSP at a time and went where MSPs gather. Outsourced IT firms that do not compete regionally meet at trade shows and peer groups to share practices, so the same pitch now reached 20 owners at once.
The quiet stretch lasted years, not months. Huntress started in fall 2015 with a $50,000 accelerator check and cloud credits; seed rounds failed through late 2015 and 2016, and the first outside money, a $750,000 convertible note from an angel group, arrived about two and a half years in.
Huntress's first version did one job: find hackers who had quietly established long-term persistent access on a machine. It did not try to catch data theft, exfiltration or lateral movement. Kyle Hanslovan's pitch was that customers could deploy the agent, forget it, and get a confident answer that nobody was lurking in the network, the way a cancer screening gives a clean result rather than a shrug. The polish went into the installer, which was silent and worked every time, because installation friction was what annoyed IT providers. The back end simply ingested raw data, the only interface was an email digest, the team inbox was the work queue, and the founders analyzed results by hand with no 24x7 coverage. Customers did not notice, because they cared about the result. Over the following decade the product grew into a broad managed security offering for businesses of roughly 2,500 employees and below. Our read: Kyle's second product, launched about five years in, is the counter-lesson. It tried to cover everything, found thousands of incidents inconsistently, and drew public criticism from the partner community. Narrow and reliable beat broad and erratic.
Huntress sells recurring protection, largely through managed service providers who resell it to the businesses whose IT they run. Kyle describes the motion as low-touch and high-velocity: enterprise vendors chase year-long sales cycles and million-dollar purchase orders, while a deal here might be worth around $10,000, so the company has to close many of them with as little manual work as possible. Early prices were made up, and as revenue approached $1 million the founders realized they were undercharging; adding capability later gave them grounds to raise prices without backlash. The company tracked monthly recurring revenue against $83,333, the $1 million ARR mark. Kyle's year-by-year recollection is roughly $1.5M, $5M, $10M, $20M, $40M, $72M and $117M, ending the latest year just shy of $120 million. Funding went from a $50,000 accelerator check to a $750,000 seed note, a $1 million angel bridge and eventually more than $300 million through Series D, at a valuation he puts just shy of $2 billion. Our read: in a service-heavy security product, analyst time per customer drives margin, so model it before setting a price.
Copy the sequence. Pick the segment incumbents ignore: Kyle counted about 35 vendors serving the Fortune 500 and went below them. Talk to strangers until the "no" answers reveal who actually buys; for Huntress that meant MSPs rather than tiny firms with no IT staff. Promise one outcome you can deliver every time, polish only the part the customer touches, and handle the rest by hand until volume forces automation. Then go where buyers already gather and teach before you sell: a keynote with a live hacking demo reaches 20 prospects at once and tells you which parts of the pitch fail. Change two things. First, set expectations with early hires. Kyle gave his first salesperson a VP of Sales title, then lost him after bringing in a leader above him once the company crossed $1 million. Second, get legal counsel and founder vesting right early; one of four cofounders left after 13 months, and only a standard vesting schedule kept the damage limited. Our read: this playbook needs genuine domain credibility. The hacking demos worked because Kyle had done the job at the NSA.
Cybersecurity carries high consequences: missed detections, slow response, or unclear escalation can expose a customer to real losses. Huntress operates at a scale far beyond a small startup; the founder reports close to 500 teammates and more than $300 million raised. A new entrant needs deep expertise, disciplined data handling, dependable monitoring, and a clear incident process before selling protection. The market is crowded, and established vendors can bundle tools into existing IT contracts. Smaller companies may acknowledge the threat but delay spending until an incident forces a decision. Service partners can open doors, but they expect enablement and support, and their customer relationships remain valuable. Start with one specific problem and customer profile, prove adoption and retention, and make claims that match the actual service. Review false positives, missed events, response times, customer churn, and margin regularly. Founder-reported scale is evidence of demand for the category, not a forecast for a new company without comparable capability and distribution.
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