Escape Lands $18 Million Funding to Scale AI-Driven Offensive Security Automation
Escape Secures $18 Million in Funding to Enhance AI-Driven Security Automation
A recent funding round has yielded $18 million in Series A financing for Escape, a company specializing in AI-driven security automation. Led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures and existing investors Iris Capital and Y Combinator, the investment aims to bolster Escape’s capabilities in automating the entire security lifecycle using AI agents.
According to a report by Check Point Research, organizations currently face an average of 1,968 cyberattacks per week, marking a 70% increase since 2023. The window between code deployment and vulnerability exploitation has shrunk to mere hours, thanks to the rapid advancement of AI. While recent industry trends focus on securing code at the developer’s IDE, this approach only addresses part of the issue. Attackers often target live systems, exploiting real-world configurations, integrations, authentication flows, and business logic that exist only in production environments.
AI Agents for Live Environment Security
Escape’s AI agents are designed to operate in these live environments, mimicking the behavior of sophisticated attackers to identify exploitable logic flaws and data leaks. By doing so, they can remediate vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. Traditional point-in-time pentesting and fragmented legacy tools are no longer sufficient, leaving security teams overwhelmed and exposed.
Founders’ Vision
Escape’s co-founders, Tristan Kalos and Antoine Carossio, set out to address this issue by replacing legacy scanners and manual offensive security processes with AI-driven automation. Kalos, a seasoned machine learning engineer and data scientist, and Carossio, a cybersecurity expert with experience working with the French government and the Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM), aim to revolutionize the security landscape.
Continuous Security Testing and Remediation
Escape’s AI agents continuously discover, test, and fix vulnerabilities within engineering workflows, automating attack surface discovery, continuous security testing, and contextual remediation. This approach enables security teams to multiply their impact without increasing headcount or alerts. A recent demonstration of Escape’s capabilities uncovered over 2,000 high-impact vulnerabilities in 5,600 publicly available applications, including 175 instances of exposed personal data.
Customer Adoption and Funding Plans
Escape has gained the trust of over 2,000 security teams worldwide, including prominent organizations such as BetterHelp, PandaDoc, and CyberCube. One customer reported a 393% return on investment after deploying Escape, reducing security testing processes from five days to five hours. Edtech platform Thinkific is also leveraging Escape to secure its applications and gain visibility into vulnerabilities.
The Series A funding will be used to enhance Escape’s AI agent capabilities, including the development of agentic pentesting that reasons about application logic rather than scanning for known patterns. The company will also scale its engineering and go-to-market teams to meet growing demand in the US and Europe.
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