Announcing our $1.1M Pre-Seed Raise

Today, we're announcing our $1.1M pre-seed raise! 

The round included participation from VTC Ventures, Front Porch Venture Partners, Blu Venture Investors, MoJo Ventures, Not Yet Ventures, Black Prism Capital Partners, and CAV Angels, along with a number of individual angel investors. This funding will accelerate our engineering efforts and expand our customer base across healthcare, defense, and other high-trust industries where AI adoption is constrained by data security and regulatory concerns.

While most AI security tools focus on monitoring models after deployment, we take a different approach by providing security for sensitive and proprietary datasets used to train AI models, addressing threats before they emerge in downstream applications.


"We have a narrow window to build safety and security into the foundation of AI systems," said our co-founder and CEO, Andrew Schoka. "Privacy and innovation have always been in tension, but AI is now accelerating that dynamic at unprecedented speed."

Hardshell was founded by Hunter Moore and Andrew Schoka, who met while serving as adjunct lecturers at the University of Virginia School of Engineering. Dr. Moore is a systems engineer by training with over two decades of experience in AI, machine learning, and AI security across defense, academia, and private industry. Schoka is a US Army veteran who previously served as a cyber operations officer at U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Army Cyber Command.

"We saw firsthand how organizations with the most sensitive data and highest stakes were struggling to adopt AI safely," said our Founder and CTO, Dr. Moore. "Most security solutions focus on evaluating and monitoring models after they're built: testing outputs, red-teaming, adding guardrails. That's necessary, but it misses the deeper problem. AI systems learn from their data, which means a compromised dataset doesn't just create a vulnerability, it trains one in. That's a fundamentally different threat, and it requires a fundamentally different approach. That's exactly what we're building at Hardshell."

We've been fortunate to be supported by a number of incredible accelerators and founder support networks, including the Batten Institute i.Lab Incubator at the University of Virginia, the Starburst National Landing Launchpad, Lighthouse Network, and the 434 Accelerator in Charlottesville.

Hardshell was founded in 2025 and is headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia.