Cybersecurity startup from Seattle XBOW has raised $120 million in a Series C round, pushing its valuation past $1 billion and placing it firmly among the sector’s newest unicorns. The financing was led by DFJ Growth and Northzone, with participation from new backers Sofina and Alkeon Capital, alongside existing investors Altimeter, NFDG Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.
The new financing is set to fuel product development, enterprise expansion, and international growth.
Why the old model is breaking down
For years, even skilled attackers were limited by one basic constraint: people. There were only so many targets a team could pursue, so many systems they could probe, and so many versions they could test at once. That limit is now fading fast.
Attackers using AI can work constantly, across every environment and every exposed surface, without the bottlenecks that once defined offensive operations. At the same time, software teams are pushing updates at a pace that traditional penetration testing struggles to match. A manual assessment conducted at one moment in time can quickly become outdated as new code ships and attack surfaces change.
That gap is where XBOW has positioned itself. The company argues that security testing must now behave more like the threats it is trying to stop. Instead of relying only on scheduled pentests, organizations are beginning to look for systems that can test continuously, adapt quickly, and keep pace with modern development cycles.
Building an autonomous hacker for the AI era
XBOW was founded by Oege de Moor, known for creating GitHub Copilot and GitHub Advanced Security, and built with engineers from the original Copilot team. From the beginning, it also paired its autonomous systems with elite human hackers. Chief Information Security Officer Nico Waisman, formerly CISO at Lyft, helped shape the company’s approach to safe deployment and assembled top offensive security talent to train the platform to think more like a real adversary.
XBOW describes its platform as autonomous offensive security. In practice, that means using AI reasoning and adversarial workflows based on real attack techniques to find and validate vulnerabilities at machine speed. The aim is not simply to generate alerts, but to uncover deeper exploits while keeping false positives low enough for security teams to act with confidence.
Over the past year, the company says it has shown that autonomous systems can operate safely in live production environments. That matters in a market where trust is hard won and bold technical claims are common. XBOW’s case rests on proving that automation can do more than assist human testers; it can deliver meaningful coverage in real-world settings where risk, complexity, and scale all matter.
XBOW’s message is straightforward. In a world of AI-powered attacks, defence can no longer stay reactive. It has to become autonomous too.
New appointees
DFJ Growth Venture Partner Ramin Sayar, former CEO of Sumo Logic, will join the board as part of the investment, bringing operating experience as XBOW pushes deeper into the enterprise market.
The company has also strengthened its leadership bench, adding Ron Gabrisko to the board, Jonaki Egenolf as Chief Marketing Officer, Dean Breda as General Counsel, and Niro Rajadurai as Chief Revenue Officer. At the start of 2026, it appointed WonLae Lee as General Manager for South Korea, signalling where some of that global ambition is headed.
“When I founded XBOW in January 2024, few believed AI could truly think like a hacker and operate at machine speed. We proved it. XBOW reached the top of the HackerOne leaderboard and is now deployed at some of the most security-forward companies in the world,” said Oege de Moor, Founder and CEO, XBOW. “Attackers are already using AI. Defenders need to move just as fast. XBOW provides that continuous speed, and this funding enables us to bring it to the entire industry.”
“XBOW was the first to demonstrate how large language models could be applied to offensive security at scale,” said Barry Schuler, Co-founder and Managing Partner, DFJ Growth. “The company didn’t just prove the technology, it also proved market demand. By combining AI reasoning with real-world adversarial expertise, XBOW is bringing the autonomous hacker to life.”
“XBOW is rapidly emerging as a category leader, with Fortune 500 and global enterprises already relying on the platform as a mission-critical layer in their security stack,” said Sanjot Malhi, Partner, Northzone. “Oege and the team have built an extraordinarily capable AI-driven security platform in a remarkably short time, and we’re thrilled to partner with them as they scale.”
