Escape, an offensive security engineering platform founded in Paris, has raised €15.4 million ($18 million) in a Series A funding round to expand its AI-powered cybersecurity platform.
The round was led by Balderton, with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures and existing investors IRIS and Y Combinator. The funding will support further development of the company’s AI agents and expansion of its engineering and commercial teams as demand for automated security tools grows.
What The Company Does
Founded in 2020 by Tristan Kalos and Antoine Carossio, Escape develops an AI-driven platform designed to automate key aspects of offensive cybersecurity testing.
The platform uses autonomous AI agents to identify, test, and remediate security vulnerabilities within live software environments. Unlike traditional security scanners that analyze code statically or rely on predefined rules, Escape’s system operates directly within production systems to evaluate real application behavior.
These AI agents analyze configurations, authentication flows, integrations, and application logic to identify vulnerabilities that conventional tools may overlook.
Escape’s platform includes several capabilities aimed at supporting continuous security monitoring. These include attack surface management, business-logic-aware dynamic application security testing (DAST), and automated AI-based penetration testing.
By integrating these functions into engineering workflows, the company aims to enable continuous vulnerability discovery and remediation without relying heavily on periodic manual penetration tests.
Advertisement
Market Context / Industry Background
As software development cycles accelerate, security teams face increasing challenges in identifying vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them.
Modern development environments often involve frequent code deployments, distributed cloud infrastructure, and numerous third-party integrations. These factors can significantly increase the potential attack surface for organizations.
At the same time, many cybersecurity teams continue to rely on legacy scanning tools or manual penetration testing services. These approaches can struggle to keep pace with rapid software release cycles.
According to industry research, the time between deployment of vulnerable code and exploitation by attackers can sometimes be measured in hours.
This dynamic has led to growing interest in automated security tools that can operate continuously and adapt to rapidly changing application environments.
Platforms that combine artificial intelligence with offensive security testing are increasingly being developed to address these challenges.
Founder / Investor Commentary
Escape co-founder and CEO Tristan Kalos said the company was created to help security teams manage the growing complexity of modern software systems.
“Security teams are outnumbered and drowning in siloed, manual processes,” Kalos said. “In a world where code is written and attacked at the speed of AI, this cannot continue.”
He explained that the company’s platform aims to provide security teams with automated offensive testing capabilities that scale alongside modern development environments.
“We are building Escape as the offensive security engineering platform to solve that problem at scale,” he said.
Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital, said the platform addresses a common dilemma faced by many security teams.
“As the number of software developers—human and agentic—explodes, security teams find themselves with an impossible dilemma,” Chandratillake said.
“They can rely on legacy scanners that lack the depth of penetration testing, or work with manual offensive security teams that cannot scale to the volume of modern code.”
He added that Escape’s AI-driven platform aims to combine the scalability of automated tools with the analytical capabilities traditionally associated with human security testing.
Growth Plans / Use Of Funds
Escape plans to use the Series A funding to expand the capabilities of its AI agents and scale its operations across the United States and Europe.
One area of focus will be the continued development of agentic penetration testing tools that analyze application logic and identify complex vulnerabilities.
The company also plans to expand its engineering team and build additional go-to-market capacity to support enterprise adoption.
According to Escape, its platform has already analyzed thousands of applications and identified a significant number of high-impact vulnerabilities. The company reports that its AI agents recently detected more than 2,000 critical vulnerabilities across approximately 5,600 publicly available applications.
By continuing to improve its AI-driven testing capabilities, Escape aims to help organizations secure production environments while reducing reliance on fragmented legacy security tools.
About Escape
Escape is a cybersecurity company that develops AI-powered platforms for offensive security testing. Founded in 2020 and originally based in Paris, the company builds autonomous AI agents that identify, test, and remediate vulnerabilities within live software environments. Escape’s platform integrates offensive security workflows into engineering pipelines, allowing organizations to monitor application security continuously and respond more quickly to emerging threats.
