Escape, a New York-based security startup, has raised $18 million in Series A to replace pen-testers with AI agents in the field. The funding was led by Balderton Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and existing backers IRIS and Y Combinator. Escape was founded by Tristan Kalos (CEO) and Antoine Carossio, two French engineers who met at UC Berkeley and worked in cybersecurity for the French government before joining Apple as a machine learning researcher. The company's platform, named "offensive security engineering", actively simulates attacker behaviour against live systems rather than waiting for vulnerabilities to be reported after deployment. The new funding will be used to roughly double the 32-person team over the coming year and expand enterprise operations across the US and Europe.