Leading a new era of proactive macOS endpoint security with advanced allowlisting
We’re thrilled to share some exciting news: North Pole Security has closed a $4 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. This funding will help us accelerate the development of Workshop, our enterprise-grade endpoint protection platform, and bring proactive, prevention-first endpoint protection to more enterprises around the world.
We’ve worked hand-in-hand with Fortune 500 design partners to ensure Workshop is not only secure, but usable in the real world. Security teams are no longer forced to choose between strong protection and operational flexibility.
— Pete Markowsky, CEO
Why This Matters
macOS is quietly taking over the business endpoint world. 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.
The challenge we’re solving is clear. Today’s threats are getting smarter, and attackers evade detection by exploiting legitimate tools, stealing credentials, and mimicking normal behavior, which lets them slip past traditional detection systems unnoticed. These challenges are exacerbated with the rise of agentic AI workflows and AI-generated code, making attackers faster and more evasive than ever, leaving reactive EDR solutions steps behind.
Our Approach: Prevention Over Detection
Workshop takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of trying to detect threats after they’ve already landed on your system, our agent stops them before they can run. Workshop uses advanced allowlisting to block unknown applications by default, reimagining traditional allowlisting with automated safety guards and streamlined approval workflows that make this proven approach scalable and livable for modern enterprises.
The platform is built on Santa, the widely adopted open source binary and file access authorization tool that we pioneered at Google and now maintain. 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.
What Workshop Delivers
Workshop provides everything security teams need 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
- Approval workflows that reduce administrator overhead and delight users
- Granular telemetry for full visibility across endpoints
What’s Next
This funding enables us to do what we do best: build world-class security tools and support the growing community of organizations that recognize the power of prevention-first security. We’re grateful to Andreessen Horowitz for believing in our vision and to all of the customers and community members who have supported us along the way.
Want to see Workshop in action? Contact Us and let us show you how proactive endpoint protection can transform your security posture.
Here’s to the next chapter of keeping the digital world safe.