PLEASANTON, Calif. – October 15, 2019 – Cowbell Cyber, a startup focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered cyber insurance for small to mid-sized enterprises, has appointed David Miles, co-founder and managing partner at ManchesterStory Group and Varun Badhwar, senior vice president of products, Prisma Cloud, at Palo Alto Networks, to its board of directors. The appointments follow Cowbell Cyber’s September 2019 launch, where the company announced the industry’s first continuous underwriting platform for cyber insurance. ManchesterStory is a venture capital firm partnering with market-leading companies in InsurTech, FinTech, and Healthcare and led the seed round for Cowbell Cyber’s launch.
“The cyber insurance market is growing at an alarming rate, and I am thrilled to welcome both David Miles and Varun Badhwar to Cowbell Cyber’s board of directors. Their wealth of cybersecurity and insurance experience will help us navigate the next steps in our go-to-market strategies,” says Jack Kudale, founder and CEO at Cowbell Cyber. “David and Varun bring a valuable combination of knowledge and strategic vision needed to position Cowbell Cyber as the leader in a rapidly growing cyber insurance market.”
David Miles is co-founder and managing partner at ManchesterStory Group. Miles brings nearly 30 years of investment and entrepreneurial experience, including as owner of Miles Capital, Inc., a multibillion-dollar insurance-company-focused asset management firm. In addition to Miles’ investment experience, he brings leadership and operating experience to Cowbell Cyber.
“Because of the evolving nature of cyber risks, we see an opportunity for cyber insurance to lead the disruption of the underwriting process,” Miles says. “We are thrilled for ManchesterStory to partner with Cowbell Cyber and support the team in their vision for a groundbreaking approach to underwriting cyber insurance.”
Varun Badhwar joins Cowbell Cyber as a serial entrepreneur with a proven track record of building transformative cybersecurity companies. He brings years of experience helping organizations address their cloud security challenges. Badhwar is most notably known as founder and CEO at RedLock, a cloud threat defense company acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2018. Today, Badhwar leads the Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud offering.
“Companies around the world rely more than ever on the cloud to run and grow their business, and the insurance market needs to reflect this shift in the use of technology,” Badhwar says. “I have been impressed by Cowbell Cyber’s vision for a new cyber insurance model that enables companies of any size to get relevant and accurate cyber coverage. I’m delighted to be helping the team through this journey of disruption.”
Using deep learning techniques and actuarial science, Cowbell Cyber identifies the probability of threat exposure and calculates its financial impacts to an organization, enabling brokers to quote and bind policies in minutes. Built on its patent-pending risk-ratings factor, Cowbell Factor™, Cowbell Cyber’s goal is to address the cyber insurability gap for organizations by offering standalone, individualized, and comprehensive cyber policies. Cowbell Cyber plans to make its initial cyber insurance policy, Cowbell Prime™, available in Q1 2020 to businesses up to $250M in six states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, and Oregon. For more information, please visit cowbell.insure.
About Cowbell Cyber
Cowbell Cyber maps insurable threats and risk exposures using artificial intelligence to determine the probability of threats and impact on coverage types for the enterprise. In its unique approach to risk selection and pricing, Cowbell combines risk observability with cyber insurance using Cowbell risk-ratings factor to offer standalone, affirmative and individualized coverage. As a result, small to medium enterprises (SMEs) can obtain insurance via brokers using simplified binding and expedited underwriting process. Cowbell Insurance Agency is a fully owned subsidiary of Cowbell Cyber and currently licensed in six states. For more information, please visit cowbell.insure.
Media Contact
Jacqueline Meyler
Lumina Communications for Cowbell Cyber
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