2019 Milestones: Paving the Way for Disruption in 2020

by | Jan 6, 2020 | Founders' Corner

January 2020 marks the first anniversary of Cowbell Cyber’s inception. It’s with great pride that I look back at what Team Cowbell accomplished in 2019 and how it paved the way for the launch of an innovative cyber insurance product later this month.  

Much was accomplished in 12 months and you can trust the Cowbell team that 2020 will come with an acceleration of what we take to market now that the Cowbell platform is live. In 2020, we will remain focused on the themes that we believe are core to enabling cyber insurance adoption and healthy growth:

  • Continuous underwriting: Underwriting cyber once a year while risk exposure changes daily does not make sense. The Cowbell’s platform is designed to support continuous underwriting and to eliminate gaps in coverage that leave businesses unprotected.  
  • Comprehensive cyber risk ratings: Company size and industry are no longer sufficient to assess a business’ risk exposure. This is why we pioneered Cowbell Factors™, a set of proprietary risk rating factors compiled by Cowbell’s proprietary algorithms. These algorithms are applied to the firmographics, outside-in and inside-out data that we collect ourselves and through strategic data partnerships.
  • Standalone, innovative and tailored cyber coverages: Every business deploys technology differently and has a different appetite for risk transfer. This is why we designed Cowbell Factors as a means to capture every organization’s unique risk exposure and map it to a set of coverages. Our goal is to offer coverages that truly make a difference for policyholders and increase their cyber resiliency. 

But let’s look back at 2019 milestones:

Jan-2019: Cowbell is founded with the goal to expedite and simplify the process of obtaining cyber insurance.

Jan-2019: The Global Insurance Accelerator GIA invites Cowbell Cyber for a 100-day program in Des Moines to help us solidify our business model. The GIA, which is backed by 13 insurance carriers, fosters innovation in insurance by supporting every year a cohort of startups with mentoring, coaching, product insights and more.

Apr-2019: Cowbell Cyber introduces itself as a Cyber Insurance MGA for SMBs and articulates its unique approach for modern cyber insurance during the 2019 Global Insurance Symposium.

May-2019: Cowbell officially opens its headquarters in Pleasanton and begins development on its AI-powered underwriting platform

Jun-2019: Cybersecurity experts and co-founders Rajeev Gupta and Prab Reddy join the Cowbell team as head of product and head of engineering respectively.

Jun-2019: Cowbell obtains its license in the state of California (CA License #0N04366) as property and casualty broker-producer.

Jul-2019: The Cowbell team grows – the founding team of 12 brings a wide range of expertise covering cybersecurity, insurance and data science to take on the challenge of cyber risk selection and pricing.

Aug-2019: Cowbell opens its insurance operations in Omaha, Nebraska with insurance veterans Trent Cooksley and Sapan S. Patel from Markel and Erie Insurance taking the lead of Cowbell’s insurance operations.

Aug-2019: Cowbell obtains licenses in 5 additional states: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, Oregon; and adds surplus licensing in addition to Property and Casualty.

Aug-2019: ManchesterStory leads $3.3 Million seed round with participation from Holmes Murphy and Tri-valley ventures.

Sep-2019: Cowbell is nominated as a top finalist in the 2019 Resiliency Challenge organized by the Insurance Information Institute.

Sep-2019: Cowbell files its provisional patent application for its Cowbell Factors™, a set of innovative cyber risk-rating factors that provide continuous assessment of risk exposures.

Sep-2019: Cowbell Cyber officially launches and announces the industry’s first continuous underwriting platform based on Cowbell Factors for Cyber Insurance at ITC 2019 in Las Vegas.

Oct-2019: Cowbell continues to establish strategic partnerships and deepens the risk rating capabilities of Cowbell Factors using a variety of outside in, inside out and proprietary data.

Oct-2019: Cowbell appoints David Miles from ManchesterStory and Varun Badhwar from Palo Alto Networks to its board of directors.

Nov-2019: Cowbell appoints Caroline Thompson from Zurich Insurance as Head of Underwriting for Cowbell and Isabelle Dumont as Head of Market Engagement

Nov-2019: Cowbell further expands its business development function with new location and staffing in Atlanta. Brandon Murphy from Markel joins as Director of Business Development.

Nov-2019: The Cowbell platform goes live with the ability to compile Cowbell Factors in real-time. Submit to quote process takes 5 minutes or less.   

Dec-2019: Cowbell opens a second engineering site in Plano, Texas and hires staff locally to advance its platform development efforts.

2020 is already up to a great start:

  • Cowbell Cyber continuous underwriting platform is now capable of pricing more than 200,000 SMEs in 15 states. Every policyholder signing up for Cowbell’s platform gets access to continuous monitoring of their organization’s evolving risk mapped to coverages through Cowbell Factors.
  • Cowbell Prime 100, our insurance product targeted at small and mid-size businesses is going live this month. We are actively appointing agencies. If you are interested or want to learn more about what makes Cowbell Cyber different from other cyber insurance providers, please contact us.
  • We are also actively working on Cowbell Connect, an ecosystem of cybersecurity and data suppliers, digital aggregators, remediation services and managed service providers. Cowbell Connect will come live later this spring. 

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