Amongst the books he read as a child, Tristan Kalos was deeply moved by those of Jules Verne: "I must have read all of Jules Verne's novels, even those which are less well-known such as 500 million Begum. The novels were fundamental to my desire to become an engineer and to create something. At the heart of every Jules Verne novel is an invention, an idea that is revolutionary in terms of the thinking of the time. It was this boundless creativity that made me want to become an inventor."
After a preparatory course at the Blaise Pascal lycée in Orsay, Tristan Kalos entered the engineering cycle at ENSTA Paris. At the end of the first year of the core curriculum, he chose the "Applied Mathematics" major, before opting for the "Artificial Intelligence" course in the third year. "I chose a very hybrid path between mathematics and computer science, which, without realising it, perfectly foreshadowed the profile of the start-up I was going to create, Escape".
In his third year, Tristan Kalos is also following the "Entrepreneurship - Intrapreneurship" profile, a course in innovation and entrepreneurship based around a team project supervised by coaching. "The aim of our project was to set up a fleet of drones capable of travelling very quickly to the scene of a motorway accident in order to assess the resources required. We won the École des Ponts 'Une nuit pour entreprendre' prize. The course was very useful to me because it helped me to start asking myself the right questions about what was involved in setting up a company, and not just about the technical and product aspects, as engineers naturally tend to do. You also have to think about customers, investors, marketing...".
Tristan Kalos completed his initial training with the X-HEC Entrepreneurs Master's degree and a spell at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley.
Alongside his studies, Tristan Kalos worked as a developer for TAEP, the junior company at ENSTA Paris. One of the mishaps that occurred during this experience was to be decisive for the rest of his career: "One day, a client called me in a huff and said, 'Tristan, the database is empty!' Hackers had managed to get into the application via the APIs, the application programming interfaces, and had stolen all the data, leaving only a ransom note."
Fortunately, Tristan had made a data backup shortly before the attack, so the damage was limited. But the alarm had been raised, which led Tristan to focus on the flaws in these famous APIs.
"These technologies are extremely vulnerable to hackers who use them to their heart's content to raid financial institutions or steal personal data. At the time, I was a very young developer, still a student, and not fully up to speed when it came to cybersecurity. I looked for solutions to protect my applications from these attacks, but they didn't exist! I was left with no choice but to create the solution myself."
And so Escape was born, created with Antoine Carossio (X 2016, HEC 2020).
"Our idea was to create an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of detecting all the security flaws in the APIs, and explaining to developers how to resolve them before hackers had time to exploit them. Everyone told us it was impossible. It took us a whole year of research and development, but we did it."
In the light of this undeniable success, capital began to flow in with an initial fund-raising of 1.6 million dollars, raised by a French investment fund and Franco-American investors, founders of companies listed on the NASDAQ, the American technology stock market.
Then on 6 June 2023, Escape announced that it had raised €3.6 million, funding that will enable it to double the size of its team by strengthening its sales teams covering Europe and the United States. The fledgling company has also been backed by Y combinator, an international startup early-stage financing company that has provided support to AirBnB, Twitch and Gitlab, among others.
"Thanks to the initial support, we were able to develop the algorithm and start marketing it. Today we're starting to make money, and there are a dozen of us working to grow that income. Our immediate objective is to expand into the United States, by opening a New York office with a marketing and sales team. But we're going to keep our R&D in France because the French engineers, particularly those from ENSTA Paris, are excellent. We're very fond of interns from ENSTA Paris who are doing their gap year or end-of-studies projects. They are good at coding and have a very good mathematical vision, especially those who have done operational research. Our technologies make extensive use of these concepts."
If Tristan Kalos is so complimentary about the profiles of ENSTA Paris students, it is of course because he himself benefited from this training:
"At ENSTA Paris, you learn to structure your reasoning in a very robust way, and that's essential for the rest of your career. It was at ENSTA Paris that I learned what research and development was really about, and how to use science to achieve real things. I also met some teacher-researchers there who helped me to develop my ability to use science to create."
When Tristan Kalos is asked if he has any advice for students or recent graduates of ENSTA Paris, the answer is obvious:
"I would tell them to be proud of what they have done, to have succeeded in getting into this school of excellence. I would also tell them to be ambitious. At every back-to-school conference, we should tell our first-year students that they will be able to change the world thanks to the quality of the training they receive. The range of possibilities open to ENSTA Paris graduates is immense!"