The headquarters tackle of certainly one of Seattle’s latest billion-dollar startups isn’t a classy workplace tower or a sprawling company campus — it’s a mailbox at a Pioneer Sq. coworking area.
XBOW, the autonomous cybersecurity firm based by GitHub Copilot creator Oege de Moor, cemented its place as one of many area’s startup unicorns Wednesday with a further $35 million in strategic funding from buyers together with NVIDIA, Accenture, Samsung, and SentinelOne, bringing its Collection C spherical to a complete of $155 million.
However is it actually a Seattle startup?
XBOW’s headquarters designation underscores the altering nature of what it means to be “primarily based” in a metropolis within the remote-work period. The corporate’s web site describes it as a remote-first crew that’s “in all places,” with Seattle only one dot on the map.
XBOW’s founder lives in Malta. Its greater than 250 staff are scattered throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia, with a comparatively small quantity within the Seattle space, understanding of the Pioneer Sq. coworking area that serves as its official tackle, in line with the corporate.
The Seattle connection comes from de Moor’s time at Microsoft, the place he led the creation of GitHub Copilot and GitHub Superior Safety. He based XBOW in January 2024 whereas nonetheless residing right here, constructing the crew from among the authentic Copilot engineers.
A spokesperson instructed GeekWire beforehand that the corporate is “open to establishing a extra everlasting footprint sooner or later” in Seattle because the crew expands.
Even so, XBOW’s funding rounds depend towards Seattle’s enterprise capital totals as tracked by PitchBook — illustrating how headquarters designations can inflate a area’s deal exercise even when the corporate’s bodily presence is minimal.
For instance, its $120 million preliminary Collection C was included in Seattle’s Q1 2026 totals, a significant addition to 1 / 4 by which the area attracted $1.5 billion throughout 69 offers.
The brand new buyers embody Accenture Ventures, NVentures (NVIDIA’s enterprise capital arm), Samsung Ventures, SentinelOne’s S Ventures, DNX Ventures, and Liberty World Tech Ventures. A number of of the buyers are additionally XBOW prospects, reflecting a development by which enterprises are backing the autonomous safety instruments they’re already utilizing.
XBOW makes use of 1000’s of autonomous AI brokers to probe software program for vulnerabilities the best way a human hacker would, however constantly and at machine pace, somewhat than by way of the periodic handbook penetration checks which were the trade normal.
The corporate’s chief info safety officer, Nico Waisman, previously CISO at Lyft, joined on the outset and assembled a crew of prime human hackers to coach XBOW’s autonomous system.
“We’re studying in actual time from groups working at large scale, and utilizing that perception to construct quicker for defenders on the entrance strains,” de Moor mentioned in an announcement.
The preliminary $120 million in Collection C funding, introduced in March, was led by DFJ Development and Northzone, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Altimeter, and others. XBOW says it now serves greater than 100 prospects worldwide, together with pharmaceutical firm Moderna.
The corporate was valued at greater than $1 billion within the earlier levels of the spherical.
