Making Cyber Insurance Easy with New Capital Raise

by | Mar 11, 2021 | Founders' Corner

 

Innovation, relentless execution, and an outrageous sense of urgency are what brought Cowbell Cyber to this month’s amazing milestone: $20 Million in funding, a network of 4,500+ trusted insurance agency partners, and premium run-rate growth of 1595% over the past 6 months.

4,500 appointed agents and brokers
1585% premium run-rate growth in past 6 months 
10 Million organizations in risk pool

We’ve celebrated our wins and the team is right back to execution, focusing on scaling our business. It’s also a good time to reflect on the roots of our success and the paths that we have crossed along the way.   

The cyber insurance market today is still in its infancy – measured at $5 Billion in 2020 projected to grow fourfold from 2018 to reach a value of more than $20B by 2025. This opportunity reminds me of the cybersecurity market which grew from about $5 Billion in the early 2000s to about $130 Billion today fueled by the roll-out of new technologies, new threats, and the digitization of many businesses.

Cyber insurance is emerging as a standalone line of insurance and is bound to follow a similar path as the cybersecurity market. Coverage will evolve to address new threats and account for rapid technology innovations while policy terms will adapt to the acceleration of digitization triggered by the 2020 pandemic. 

As we enter 2021, cyber insurance is also at a crossroads: the proliferation of incidents puts pressure on insurers to modernize how they underwrite cyber risk and inject technology and artificial intelligence to bring speed, precision, and scale into the process.

Last week, Google announced a cyber insurance initiative to use cloud configuration data to help underwrite cyber risk. We look at this as an evolutionary step to make a new form of cyber insurance mainstream: one where all risk data (internal and external) is made available to risk underwriting with a common goal to help enterprises protect their businesses from cyber incidents. 

The above is exactly why two years ago, with my co-founders, Trent Cooksley, Rajeev Gupta, and Prab Reddy, we ventured on a path to build a new type of insurance company that empowers small and medium-size businesses to benefit from the financial protection of cyber insurance. The roadblocks abounded: hard to understand policies, lack of standardization, insurability gaps, what was perceived as a dearth of data, incomplete and limited assessment of cyber risks, multi-layered and complex distribution model for insurance, and so on. 

Today I am thrilled to report that we have built a robust cyber insurance business, with innovation across three pillars of insurance:

  • Expedited distribution: our 100% online approach removes the burden of a paper-based process while enabling agents and brokers to customize quotes in a few clicks and issue policies in minutes. 
  • Precise underwriting: the adoption of cyber insurance by businesses under $1Billion of revenue has been lagging, representing the untapped opportunity that Cowbell is focused on. But, how do you solve the need to underwrite at speed without losing accuracy? We built MOO, our underwriting bot assistant that collects and makes sense of large volumes of risk data instantaneously so that our underwriters can apply their expertise where it is most needed to serve policyholders. 
  • Closed-loop risk management: we are building a different kind of insurance company by going beyond risk transfer to take an active role in helping our policyholders improve their risk profile. This is why we are developing a robust ecosystem of partners to bring expertise throughout the risk management lifecycle starting with training, risk assessment, risk insights, and breach services. 

Innovation and speed are part of the Cowbell team’s DNA and with this new funding, we will expand the efficacy of Cowbell Factors™, our proprietary rating factors while deepening our ability to serve a broader market with cyber policies that match the needs of enterprises across industries. 

Cowbell Cyber could not be where we are without the incredible efforts of 40+ Cowbellers and the trust of our agency partners and policyholders. I want to personally thank them for helping us get to this milestone in our journey. 

I also want to thank our investors and board members who have been supportive and great advisors since the first day of our journey: Dave Miles, Ellen Willadsen, and Don Garman, and a handful of others who trusted us pre-product and pre-revenue. As we got to know the teams at Brewer Lane Ventures, Avanta Ventures, and Pivot Investments over the past years, I feel humbled and excited by the incredible wisdom and experience they bring to Cowbell Cyber with this new funding. I am delighted to welcome Martha Notaras to Cowbell’s board of directors and look forward to working with her. As cyber insurance becomes mainstream, we are thrilled to be at the forefront of defining this new market that is more and more vital to the stability of our economy.   

As our business grows, we are aggressively hiring in all functions (check our open positions), recruiting new partners, and appointing agencies. We welcome feedback and value ideas you bring to us. Feel free to contact us at uryyb@pbjoryyplore.nv

 

 

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