XBOW, the leader in autonomous offensive security, today announced it has been named a Fast Company 2026 Next Big Things in Tech honoree, an annual list recognizing breakthrough technologies with the potential to transform industries and shape the future. The honor marks XBOW’s second Fast Company recognition this year, following its World Changing Ideas win, and comes as the company continues to move autonomous hacking from an emerging capability into real-world enterprise security operations.
Frontier AI is rapidly changing the speed and scale of vulnerability discovery. But identifying where a vulnerability might exist is only part of the challenge. Enterprises need to know whether a finding represents a real, exploitable risk, and they need systems capable of safely validating that risk before security teams take action.
XBOW brings together leading offensive security experts and AI researchers to provide that execution layer for autonomous offensive security. Its model-agnostic platform orchestrates specialized AI agents that reason across complex attack paths, operate offensive security tooling, and validate exploitability before surfacing findings to customers. XBOW is also advancing the orchestration, validation, and safety infrastructure needed to translate increasingly powerful AI reasoning into reliable security outcomes.
“AI is getting remarkably good at identifying where vulnerabilities might exist, but that’s only the beginning,” said Oege de Moor, Founder and CEO of XBOW. “The next big shift is giving AI the ability to operate safely in the real world and prove what is actually exploitable. That is what we’ve built at XBOW, and we’re honored to have Fast Company recognize our work as one of the next big things in technology.”
XBOW’s original breakthrough was proving that AI agents could autonomously perform the work of a skilled penetration tester. Over the past year, they have continued to build the infrastructure around that capability so organizations can deploy it broadly. Those innovations include:
- Autonomous Exposure Management (AEM), which extends autonomous testing from individual applications to an organization’s entire external application estate.
- The XBOW Public API, which makes autonomous offensive security assessments something enterprises can build into their own security infrastructure.
- The XBOW Integration for Jira, which can automatically turn validated XBOW findings into Jira work items.
- EU Data Residency, which enables European enterprises to keep security-sensitive assessment data stored and processed in the EU.
Key to XBOW’s product innovation is its robust vulnerability and AI research. This year, XBOW received early access to evaluate Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and tested models including Anthropic’s Opus 4.7, xAI’s Grok models, China’s GLM-5.2 and Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 in real offensive security workflows. This research provides a window into what those models can accomplish in practice, and the infrastructure required to deploy them safely for offensive security. On the vulnerability research front, XBOW became the first autonomous system ever to find critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Cloud when it uncovered and reported three RCEs to the Microsoft Security Research Center earlier this year. XBOW has also expanded its vulnerability research to include a dedicated Native Team focused on hardened, critical software. The team recently earned a $250,000 reward through Google’s Vulnerability Rewards Program after demonstrating an end-to-end exploit against a shipping version of Chrome. The Chrome finding was one of more than 1,000 verified vulnerabilities XBOW submitted against real-world production targets over the past 12 months.
Today, more than 100 organizations worldwide, including Moderna and Seznam, use XBOW to continuously identify and remediate exploitable vulnerabilities across their applications and infrastructure. By providing evidence-based validation of real attack paths rather than theoretical risks, XBOW helps security teams focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most.
“The most exciting technology innovations are the ones that move beyond promise to demonstrate real potential for impact,” said Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “The companies and teams recognized on this year’s list are tackling ambitious problems with new ideas, products, and approaches that have the potential to fundamentally shape the years ahead.”
For more information or to view the complete Fast Company 2026 Next Big Things in Tech list, visit here.
About XBOW
XBOW is the autonomous offensive security company redefining cyber defense for the AI era. Combining AI reasoning with offensive security workflows, the XBOW platform delivers expert-level security testing at machine speed. XBOW empowers security teams to transform from reactive to proactive defense at AI scale. For XBOW customers, autonomous offense is the best defense.
About Fast Company
Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow business publication Inc. For more information, please visit fastcompany.com.
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