The XBOW team photo from the company’s website shows employees gathered in Malta, where founder and CEO Oege de Moor is based. The company lists Seattle as its headquarters. (XBOW Photo)
The headquarters address of one of Seattle’s newest billion-dollar startups isn’t a trendy office tower or a sprawling corporate campus — it’s a mailbox at a Pioneer Square coworking space.
XBOW, the autonomous cybersecurity company founded by GitHub Copilot creator Oege de Moor, cemented its position as one of the region’s startup unicorns 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 $155 million.
But is it really a Seattle startup?
XBOW’s headquarters designation underscores the changing nature of what it means to be “based” in a city in the remote-work era. The company’s website describes it as a remote-first team that is “everywhere,” with Seattle just one dot on the map.
XBOW’s founder lives in Malta. Its more than 250 employees are scattered across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, with a relatively small number in the Seattle area, working out of the Pioneer Square coworking space 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 creation of GitHub Copilot and GitHub Advanced Security. He founded XBOW in January 2024 while still living here, building the team from some of the original Copilot engineers.
A spokesperson told GeekWire previously that the company is “open to establishing a more permanent footprint in the future” in Seattle as the team expands.
Even so, XBOW’s funding rounds count toward Seattle’s venture capital totals as tracked by PitchBook — illustrating how headquarters designations can inflate a region’s deal activity even when the company’s physical presence is minimal.
For example, its $120 million initial Series C was included in Seattle’s Q1 2026 totals, a meaningful addition to a quarter in which the region attracted $1.5 billion across 69 deals.
The 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 of the investors are also XBOW customers, reflecting a trend in which enterprises are backing the autonomous security tools they’re already using.
XBOW uses thousands of autonomous AI agents to probe software for vulnerabilities the way a human hacker would, but continuously and at machine speed, rather than through the periodic manual penetration tests that have been the industry standard.
The company’s chief information security officer, Nico Waisman, formerly CISO at Lyft, joined at the outset and assembled a team of top human hackers to train XBOW’s autonomous system.
“We’re learning in real time from teams operating at massive scale, and using that insight to build faster for defenders on the front lines,” de Moor said in a statement.
The initial $120 million in Series C funding, announced in March, was led by DFJ Growth and Northzone, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Altimeter, and others. XBOW says it now serves more than 100 customers worldwide, including pharmaceutical company Moderna.
The company was valued at more than $1 billion in the earlier stages of the round.
