Tristan Kalos and Antoine Carossio’s venture, Escape, an API security company fresh from Y Combinator’s 2023 cohort, has just closed its seed round on $3.9m.
The investors backing Escape’s vision include lead investor IRIS, along with Frst, Y Combinator, Irregular Expressions, Tiny Supercomputers, Kima Ventures, and notable angel investors like Philippe Langlois, Mehdi Medjaoui, and Roxanne Varza.
Paris-based Escape is positioned to tackle a critical problem in the cyber landscape—securing APIs at every step of development. Given that a whopping 91% of APIs are currently susceptible to hacker activity, according to Gartner, this mission is both timely and vital. API vulnerabilities persist due to rapid and continual updates made by developers in the cloud, often outpacing security team assessments. Escape’s solution empowers security teams to constantly assess and resolve security breaches at any stage of the development process.
With the newly acquired funds, Escape plans to augment its workforce, focusing on hiring international sales specialists and engineers. The goal is to expedite global product adoption and the creation of new security features. The firm’s expansion will be well-served by this investment, especially in their quest to double the team’s size within the next year.
It’s noteworthy that Escape’s API security platform, launched just six months ago, has already fortified the applications of over 1,000 organisations worldwide. Among their clients are well-known companies like Shine (Société Générale), Sorare, and Neo4J.
Adrien Montfort, CTO of Sorare, praised Escape’s contribution, “Escape was able to find and help us fix security flaws that human security auditors have not seen. By doing so as early as during the development process, Escape allows us to always stay secure and ahead of hackers.”
In addition to currently supporting modern technologies like GraphQL and OpenAPI, Escape has plans to broaden its scope in the coming months. Earlier this year, the firm introduced SecureGPT, a free and speedy security tool designed exclusively for ChatGPT APIs.
Escape’s co-founder and CEO Tristan Kalos expressed his optimism, “As a developer myself, I saw how hard it was to secure web applications at any stage. With Escape, we provide engineering teams with the right tooling to create secure applications and protect their user’s data. This new funding round led by top-notch investors will allow us to accelerate our international expansion and continue investing in R&D to widen the technological advance with our competition.”
Echoing this sentiment, Julien-David Nitlech, Managing Partner at IRIS, expressed his admiration, “We are tech admirers, especially when it helps solve security issues that put many infrastructures at risk. Escape is a young start-up that targets a very common security breach without excluding any type of developers and their product already has a global scale that will allow them to help build a much safer web.”
Escape, founded in 2020, has a user base in the thousands and aims to establish itself as an international leader in API Security in the coming years.
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