Oege de Moor

A Word Processor for His Father

He started programming young. My very first program was a word processor so my dad, who was a professor of Semitic languages, could type his manuscripts on his computer, he told Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast. At university the mathematics behind computing took over, and he followed it into academic research.

Oxford and Magdalen College

De Moor finished his undergraduate studies at Utrecht University in 1987 and earned his DPhil at Oxford in 1992, holding a junior research fellowship at St John's College while he studied, according to Magdalen College. He was elected tutor in computation at Magdalen in 1993. His research moved from the mathematical foundations of algorithm design to programming tools, and tutorials with students often turned into joint papers; several of those students later joined his company.

Semmle and the Move to GitHub

He founded Semmle in December 2006 as a spin-out of his group's research on querying code as data, and by 2008 it was selling to large customers, including NASA, which used it to help ensure the safe landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012, according to Oxford's Department of Computer Science. In 2015 he became an emeritus fellow at Magdalen to work on Semmle full time. But as soon as you start doing applied stuff, there's no place like a startup.

GitHub bought Semmle in 2019, after it had raised $31 million, TechCrunch reported. At GitHub he looked ahead to AI writing code. I wrote a memo in December of 2020 where I sketched what would later become Copilot. The team that built it was small. When we launched, we were only 10 people, something like that.

Founding XBOW

XBOW grew out of something that bothered him at Semmle, where researchers used the product to find likely vulnerabilities and then wrote the exploits by hand. Even at that time, it was kind of embarrassing to me that that last step of finding the exploits was done manually. Procurement taught him the same lesson from the buyer's side: At Semmle, our first “one last thing” from procurement was a pentest request right as a major deal was about to close.

He founded XBOW in January 2024 with engineers from the original Copilot team, and in March 2026 it raised $120 million at a valuation above $1 billion, according to XBOW. He says the hard part of autonomous hacking is restraint. Early versions behaved, he said, like an overeager, super brilliant teenager who would do lots of attacks and find something. XBOW has built guardrails to stop it before it does harm.