Nathan Sobo is Co-Founder and CEO at Zed Industries, a high-performance code editor built in Rust for collaborative AI coding. Zed has grown to over 170,000 active developers and raised over $42 million in total funding.

Nathan joined GitHub in 2011 as one of the first engineers to build Atom text editor, leading the team until 2018. He also co-created Electron, the software framework that launched a generation of desktop apps, and pioneered Teletype for Atom using conflict-free replicated data types.

Nathan attended the University of Southern California and previously worked as Director of Engineering at Warp. He has spent nearly two decades pursuing his vision of building the ultimate code editor combining power with responsiveness.

Zed was founded in 2019 and raised $10M Series A in 2023 led by Redpoint Ventures, followed by $32M Series B in 2025 led by Sequoia Capital. The editor went open source in 2024, attracting over 1,100 contributors.

Zed created the Agent Client Protocol connecting coding agents to different surfaces, adopted by JetBrains and multiple agent developers. The company is pioneering character-level permalinks powered by CRDTs to transform codebases into multi-dimensional sources of context.