Startup profile · funding coverage
Escape funding, valuation and investors
AI-native offensive security platform — continuous API discovery, pentesting, and remediation agents.
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Funding, valuation & investors
Answer-first snapshotLatest funding
Series A
$18M · March 2026
Latest known valuation
Not publicly disclosed
Total disclosed equity funding
$18M
Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.
Current status
private
series a · Paris, France
Investors in latest funding
Lead: Balderton Capital
Other: Uncorrelated Ventures , IRIS , Y Combinator
Overview
Escape is a Paris-founded offensive security engineering platform whose AI agents continuously discover, test, and remediate vulnerabilities in applications and APIs — embedded in engineering workflows rather than delivering static PDF reports. Founded in 2020 by Tristan Kalos (CEO) and Antoine Carossio (CTO), Escape serves 2,000+ security teams including BetterHelp, PandaDoc, CyberCube, and Arkose Labs. In March 2026 it raised $18M (€15.4M) Series A led by Balderton Capital, with Uncorrelated Ventures and existing investors IRIS and Y Combinator participating. The company is expanding engineering and GTM in the U.S. and Europe.
Why Escape is interesting
Escape's $18M Series A led by Balderton in March 2026 targets the gap between legacy DAST scanners and manual pentests — agentic testing that reasons about business logic as AI-generated code explodes attack surfaces.
Product & use cases
Escape deploys AI agents inside engineering pipelines to automate attack-surface discovery, business-logic-aware DAST, agentic pentesting in production-like environments, and contextual remediation — replacing periodic scans with continuous offensive testing.
- Financial services and telco teams meeting DORA/NIS2 API security requirements
- Security teams outnumbered by developers and AI coding agents needing scalable offensive testing
- Enterprises mapping undocumented API endpoints before breach-driven discovery
Key facts
- Series A (Mar 2026): $18M led by Balderton Capital (Escape blog / SaaS News)
- 2,000+ security teams; customers include BetterHelp, PandaDoc, Arkose Labs
- Agentic pentesting that reasons about application logic, not just known CVE patterns
- Y Combinator and IRIS are existing investors; expanding U.S. and EU enterprise GTM
- EU DORA and NIS2 regulations driving mandatory API security budgets in 2026
Funding history (newest first)
Series A
2026-03 $18M- Balderton Capital (lead)
- Uncorrelated Ventures (participant)
- IRIS (participant)
- Y Combinator (participant)
Source: https://escape.tech/blog/escape-raises-18m-series-a/
Investors in our directory
Funds linked from Escape's profile — open a fund page for stage focus and related deal articles.
Competitive landscape
Edge: Escape merges pentest-quality reasoning with scanner-scale automation — agents that understand application logic outperform pattern-matching DAST on modern API-heavy and AI-generated codebases, per Balderton's investment thesis.
API breaches remain a top enterprise incident pattern while agentic AI multiplies undocumented endpoints. Escape competes in a crowded API-security market but differentiates on continuous agent-driven pentesting with remediation — a wedge as compliance deadlines force budget allocation in EU regulated sectors.
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Salt Security direct
API security and posture management; strong on discovery but less agentic pentest remediation loop.
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Noname Security (Akamai) direct
API security platform acquired by Akamai; incumbent distribution vs Escape's agent-native approach.
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XBOW direct
AI-powered autonomous pentesting; similar agentic offensive security category.
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Horizon3.ai adjacent
Autonomous penetration testing; broader network focus vs Escape's API/application depth.
Notable stories
- Balderton partner Suranga Chandratillake argued 'the days of pen-testing being a sporadic, manually driven process are over' when leading Escape's Series A (Escape blog, March 2026).
- Founders Kalos and Carossio are Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni combining ML engineering and security research backgrounds — unusual for offensive security tooling.
Industries
Market / IPO context
Editorial / static context — not a live quote.
Related funding articles
Venture Capital Tracker pieces that cover Escape's financing or category context.
FAQs about Escape
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