Company aims to replace outdated and reactive EDR tools with Workshop, a prevention-first platform that blocks threats before they start
North Pole Security announced it has raised $4 million in seed funding to deliver the first scalable, enterprise-grade endpoint protection platform for macOS, designed for proactive malware prevention. Led by Andreessen Horowitz, this infusion of capital will enable North Pole Security to accelerate go-to-market efforts and enhance its platform, Workshop, for enterprise customers.
“macOS is quietly taking over the business endpoint world,” said Pete Markowsky, CEO, North Pole Security. “One out of every five business machines in the U.S. are now running macOS, but the industry still lacks a real security playbook for it. Workshop enables teams to confidently lock down macOS endpoints at scale without compromising usability or introducing operational overhead.”
Today’s threats evade detection by exploiting legitimate tools, stealing credentials and mimicking normal behavior to slip past traditional detection systems unnoticed. These challenges are only exacerbated with the rise of agentic AI workflows and AI-generated code, making attackers faster and more evasive than ever, and leaving reactive EDR solutions steps behind.
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North Pole Security’s Workshop platform uses advanced allowlisting to block unknown applications by default. By reimagining traditional allowlisting with automated safety guards and streamlined approval workflows, Workshop makes this proven approach scalable and livable for modern enterprises. This proactively stops threats before compromise occurs, rather than chasing them after damage is done.
The platform is built on Santa, the widely adopted open source binary and file access authorization tool pioneered at Google by the founders of North Pole Security, who now maintain the project. While allowlisting is widely acknowledged as the gold standard in endpoint defense, it has traditionally been seen as too rigid for broad enterprise deployment. Workshop changes that by allowing teams to deploy allowlisting at scale without breaking workflows or risking outages. Workshop delivers the following benefits to customers in a single, performant platform:
- Prevention-first architecture to stop threats before they run
- Real-time enforcement to instantly reflect policy changes
- USB/SD media control to prevent unapproved device use
- Granular telemetry for full visibility across endpoints
“We’ve worked hand-in-hand with Fortune 500 design partners to ensure Workshop is not only secure, but usable in the real world,” added Markowsky. “Security teams are no longer forced to choose between strong protection and operational flexibility.”
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