Offensive security engineering platform startup Escape Technologies SAS announced today that it has raised $18 million in new funding to expand its artificial intelligence-agent security platform, including developing agentic penetration testing capabilities and scaling up its engineering and enterprise go-to-market teams in the U.S. and Europe.

Founded in 2020, Escape offers an offensive security engineering platform that is designed to identify and remediate security issues directly within live environments. The platform uses AI agents that simulate attacker behavior to discover vulnerabilities that arise from application logic, configuration and integrations after code is deployed.

Escape’s platform works by continuously mapping the external attack surface of applications and running automated security assessments against live services. The AI agents emulate techniques used in penetration testing, such as interacting with authentication flows, application programming interfaces and business logic, to identify potential weaknesses.

The agents also perform ongoing attack-surface discovery, including executing testing routines against identified components and generate remediation guidance that can be incorporated into engineering workflows. The process is designed to run continuously to move from detection to contextual remediation while maintaining visibility into discovered issues.

Escape’s platform is used by security and engineering teams responsible for protecting cloud-based applications and distributed software environments. Typical use cases include testing APIs, validating multitenant application security, identifying exposure of sensitive data and evaluating business logic vulnerabilities such as insecure direct object references.

“Security teams are outnumbered and drowning in siloed, manual processes,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Tristan Kalos. “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.”

The company claims more than 2,000 security teams globally are using its platform to run more than 300,000 security assessments a month. Notable Escape customers include BetterHelp Inc., PandaDoc Inc., CyberCube Analytics Inc. and Arkose Labs Inc..

The Series A round was led by Balderton Capital Management Ltd., with Uncorrelated Ventures and previous investors IRIS Software Group Ltd. and Y Combinator also participating.

“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 work with manual offensive security teams and fail to scale to the volume of code being written,” said Suranga Chandratillake, a partner at Balderton Capital. “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.”

Photo: Escape