Escape lands $18 million funding to scale AI-driven offensive security automation
Escape has raised $18 million in Series A funding to automate the entire security lifecycle with AI agents. The round, led by Balderton Capital with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures and existing investors Iris Capital and Y Combinator, will help lean security teams fight back at a time when code is being written and attacked. According to Check Point Research, organizations now face an average of 1,968 cyberattacks per week, a 70% increase since 2023.
AI has compressed the window between code being shipped and vulnerabilities being exploited to hours. While recent industry shifts have focused on securing code at the developer’s IDE, it’s only part of the story. Attackers exploit live systems targeting real configurations, integrations, authentication flows and business logic that only exist in production. Escape’s AI agents operate exactly here: mimicking the behaviour of a sophisticated attacker to find exploitable logic flaws and data leaks that exist only in live environments, and remediating before attackers get to them first.
Point-in-time pentesting and fragmented legacy tools can’t keep pace, leaving security teams who are currently outnumbered 100-to-1 by developers, overwhelmed and exposed. CEO Tristan Kalos and CTO Antoine Carossio, founded Escape to fix this broken model by replacing legacy scanners and manual offensive security processes with AI agents that automate the full lifecycle. Tristan has experience as a machine learning engineer and data scientist working in Spain and France, while Antoine has extensive cybersecurity experience from working with the French government and the Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM).
Fighting fire with fire
Escape’s agents continuously discover, test and fix vulnerabilities directly within engineering workflows. They automate attack surface discovery, continuous security testing, and contextual remediation. Instead of generating a report that sits in a queue, Escape’s agents keep the system moving from the moment a vulnerability is found to the moment it’s fixed. In this way, Escape multiplies the impact of security teams at scale, without increasing headcount or alerts.
To put the scale of the threat into perspective, Escape’s team recently uncovered more than 2,000 high-impact vulnerabilities hidden in 5,600 publicly available vibe-coded applications. This included 175 instances where personal data was exposed, often with several sensitive secrets revealed at once. Every vulnerability was present in live production systems and discoverable in hours.
“The days of pen-testing being a sporadic, manually driven process are over. As the number of software developers (both human and agentic) explodes, security teams find themselves with an impossible dilemma: rely on legacy scanners, knowing they do not have the quality of pen-testing or continue to work with manual offensive security teams and fail to scale to the volume of code being written. Escape has solved this challenge with the world’s first AI-native, offensive security platform that blends the scalability and relentless capacity of technology with the ingenuity of your security team. We are hugely impressed with how rapidly Escape has become a trusted platform for sophisticated organisations around the world and look forward to partnering with the team to further their work,” said Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital.
Escape is trusted by 2,000+ security teams globally, including BetterHelp, PandaDoc, CyberCube, Arkose Labs and more. One recent customer and global leader in its field saw a 393% ROI after deploying Escape, shrinking its security testing processes from five days to five hours. While edtech platform Thinkific is using Escape to secure its applications end-to-end and gain visibility into vulnerabilities while embedding continuous, developer-friendly security testing into its workflow.
In total, Escape now runs more than 300,000 security assessments a month across its global base, which can equate to days of manual testing that security teams get back every month.
“Security teams are outnumbered and drowning in siloed, manual processes. In a world where code is written and attacked at the speed of AI, this cannot continue. We are building Escape as the offensive security engineering platform to solve that problem at scale,” said Tristan Kalos, CEO of Escape.
“Escape’s IDOR scanning and multi-tenant capabilities set it apart from other security testing solutions. We can test multiple scenarios that simply aren’t possible elsewhere. We’ve fully automated team onboarding with project-scoped permissions, and the team is incredibly responsive to feedback and actually implements it,” Daniel Ilies, IT Security Engineer at Visma, added.
The Series A will deepen the platform’s AI agent capabilities, including agentic pentesting that reasons about application logic rather than scanning for known patterns, and scaling the engineering and go-to-market teams to meet growing enterprise demand in the US and Europe.