Escape, an offensive security engineering platform that uses AI agents to discover and fix software vulnerabilities, has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Balderton, with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures and existing investors IRIS and Y Combinator.
The company said the new funding will support the expansion of its AI-powered platform designed to automate the full lifecycle of application security, including discovery, testing, and remediation of vulnerabilities. The investment will also help Escape scale its engineering and go-to-market teams as demand increases among enterprise customers in the United States and Europe.
Founded by CEO Tristan Kalos and CTO Antoine Carossio, Escape aims to replace legacy security scanners and manual penetration testing processes with AI agents that continuously simulate attacker behavior. These agents analyze live production environments, identifying logic flaws, configuration issues, and data leaks before attackers can exploit them.
The company said modern security teams struggle to keep pace with rapidly growing cyber threats and the accelerating speed of software development. According to Check Point Research cited in the announcement, organizations now face an average of 1,968 cyberattacks per week, representing a 70% increase since 2023.
Escape’s platform operates directly within engineering workflows, automating attack surface discovery, continuous security testing, and contextual remediation. Rather than producing static vulnerability reports, the company’s AI agents work from the moment an issue is discovered through to remediation, helping security teams address risks more quickly.
The startup said it has identified more than 2,000 high-impact vulnerabilities across 5,600 publicly available AI-generated applications, including 175 cases where sensitive personal data was exposed. These vulnerabilities were found in live production systems and could be discovered within hours.
Escape reports that its platform is used by more than 2,000 security teams worldwide, including organizations such as BetterHelp, PandaDoc, CyberCube, Arkose Labs, and Thinkific. The company said its system now conducts more than 300,000 security assessments each month.
The Series A funding will support further development of Escape’s AI agent capabilities, including agentic penetration testing designed to analyze application logic rather than relying solely on known vulnerability patterns.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Tristan Kalos, CEO And Co-Founder, 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, Visma
“We believe Escape is the company that has developed the best pentesting technology in Europe and even in the United States, at a time when AI is causing the number of attacks to skyrocket. This round comes at a time when market demand is massive and the solution clearly stands out for its robustness, clear differentiation, and comprehensive product offering.”
Julien-David Nitlech, Managing Partner, IRIS
