XBOW, the unicorn with a Seattle mailbox, raises another $35M for its private hacking platform – GeekWire
The headquarters address for one of Seattle’s newest billion-dollar startups isn’t a trendy office tower or a sprawling corporate campus — it’s a mailbox in a Pioneer Square office space.
XBOW, an independent cybersecurity company founded by GitHub Copilot creator Oege de Moor, solidified its position as one of the region’s startup unicorns on Wednesday with an additional $35 million in strategic funding from investors including NVIDIA, Accenture, Samsung, and SentinelOne, bringing its Series C round to a total of $5 million.
But is it really a Seattle startup?
The designation of XBOW’s headquarters underscores the changing nature of what it means to be “based” in a city in the age of remote work. The company’s website describes it as a remote team that’s “everywhere,” with just one dot of Seattle on the map.
The founder of XBOW lives in Malta. Its more than 250 employees are scattered across the US, Europe and Asia, with a relatively small number in the Seattle area, working out of a Pioneer Square office that serves as its official address, according to the company.
The Seattle connection comes from de Moor’s time at Microsoft, where he led the development of GitHub Copilot and GitHub Advanced Security. He founded XBOW in January 2024 while living here, forming a team from some of the original Copilot developers.
A spokesperson previously told GeekWire that the company is “open to establishing a permanent location in the future” in Seattle as the group expands.
Still, XBOW’s funding rounds count among the Seattle business’ total revenue as tracked by PitchBook — showing how a headquarters designation can boost regional activity even if a company’s presence is small.
For example, its first Series C of $120 million was placed in Seattle’s Q1 2026 total, a significant addition to a quarter in which the region attracted $1.5 billion across 69 deals.
New investors include Accenture Ventures, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Samsung Ventures, SentinelOne’s S Ventures, DNX Ventures, and Liberty Global Tech Ventures. Several investors are also XBOW customers, reflecting a trend where businesses are backing the private security tools they already use.
XBOW uses thousands of independent AI agents to scan software for vulnerabilities just as a hacker would, but continuously and at machine speed, rather than periodic penetration testing that has become the industry standard.
The company’s chief security officer, Nico Waisman, a former CISO at Lyft, initially joined and assembled a team of top hackers to train XBOW’s autonomous system.
“We learn in real-time from teams operating at scale, and use that insight to quickly build on the defenders on the front line,” de Moor said in a statement.
The first $120 million in Series C funding, announced in March, was led by DFJ Growth and Northzone, with the participation of Sequoia Capital, Altimeter, and others. XBOW says it now serves more than 100 clients worldwide, including pharmaceutical company Moderna.
The company is valued at more than $1 billion in the early stages of the round.
