Kyle Hanslovan

Growing Up Without Much Money

He has described his childhood in plain terms. On the investor podcast Inside the Network he said Pretty darn broke is probably the literal exact words I used. With no money for games, he learned to take them apart: my earliest days and my only access to video games was could I pull apart a video game? Could I figure out how it's DRM, you know, the the digital rights management software work? He spent his evenings on IRC and on free America Online trial discs, and he credits that period with teaching him reverse engineering long before anyone paid him for it.

His mother shaped the way he later thought about business. She was an accountant, and after the family moved to Florida she opened a salon even though she did not cut hair herself. She was purely an accountant, but she saw kind of a need. The salon lifted the family into what he calls a real middle-class life, and he said it ended up blowing up to like 5,000 square feet after I joined the service.

Enlisting in the Air Force at 17

He had joined the Navy Junior ROTC and planned to go to the US Naval Academy. He told Forgepoint Capital's Forgecast how that plan ended: Then on my 17th birthday, I was like, I am getting in way too much trouble. I just need to get out of Dodge. I enlisted and ended up in the Air Force. He started in communications and moved into intelligence work, serving on active duty and later as a cyber warfare operator with the Maryland Air National Guard. Two of his three children were born in England while he was stationed there.

On the PMF Show he put the total at between my active duty time and national guard time, I did 13 years with NSA. The work combined hacking with statistics at a scale few private companies saw. And NSA's mission was like a dopamine hit. He has said the job taught him that a small team facing huge volumes of data has to automate almost everything, with people kept in charge of the judgment calls. He also became a technical trainer and spoke at Black Hat and BSides, and he has mentioned winning DEF CON's Capture the Flag contest before Huntress raised money.

Founding Huntress in Maryland

He co-founded Huntress in 2015 with John Ferrell and Chris Bisnett, two colleagues from the intelligence community. The idea came from watching skilled attackers make mistakes. On the PMF Show he flipped an old industry saying: hackers only have to be wrong once for a defender to succeed. Huntress set out to find the footholds attackers leave behind on computers they have broken into, and to sell that service to businesses that could not afford an NSA-trained hunter. The mission was personal. I just couldn't shake this idea that, like, my mom would never be able to afford my talent.

The early years were lean. He bootstrapped for about three years, and an early test at an NSA exercise gave him his proof: My technology that was tested here found 36 of 36 at the time, and that was real. When the team bet its remaining money on a trade show for managed service providers in Florida, we didn't have the money to ship the trade show stuff. We drove it down and slept in the car. He has said more than 60 investors turned down the Series A, partly because Huntress was a fully remote company based in Maryland selling to small businesses, which he called three strikes against it.

The bet on small businesses held. On Inside the Network in 2026, the hosts described Huntress as approaching $500 million in revenue with about 250,000 customers, and average contracts still around $20,000 a year. Huntress is based in Columbia, Maryland.

Hackers, Passwords and AI

He talks about attackers in practical terms. On the PMF Show he explained that stolen passwords are now the easiest way in: It turns out it is so easy now for hackers to gather your password. He compares cyber threats to viruses that keep mutating, which is why Huntress pairs automated detection with analysts who write new detections as attacks change.

His view of generative AI has shifted. He told Inside the Network that Huntress began as skeptics and kept testing: I'd call us AI pessimist in '22 to '23. On Forgecast he said AI has improved attacks without creating new elite hackers: I’m not seeing script kiddies become nation-state actors overnight- but I am now seeing some places where the world of creating offensive software has been democratized.

Family and the Cost of the Climb

He has been open about what the founding years cost at home. My kids were five, nine, and 11 when I founded Huntress. His children helped staple new fabric onto dirty office dividers in the company's first small office, and an intern once drove a U-Haul four hours to save money. He has said he now sees a therapist, as I'm trying to like figure out how to keep sprinting a marathon without burning out.