Why We Invested: Cowbell Cyber

Cyber exposures represent the most dynamic system of threats in the digital age, as businesses continuously deploy new systems and onboard new employees. This pace of change is being compounded by an acceleration of business digitization, with the coronavirus pandemic further speeding up these processes.

More recently, traditional cyber insurance providers — commonly limited to underwriting risk based on static applications and limited cyber risk insights — have experienced an increase in claim frequency and severity; in some cases, portfolios are becoming increasingly disconnected from what they committed to insure when policies were issued.

Due to the changing nature of cyber risk and the need to keep cyber policies aligned with evolving exposures, it is imperative for cyber insurers to revisit underwriting procedures frequently, to ensure that they are most accurately and effectively protecting their customers against cyber risk.

Today, we’re excited to share news of our most recent insurance investment, Cowbell Cyber. Cowbell is paving the way for a new generation of cyber insurance that relies on continuous risk assessment and continuous underwriting to deliver adaptive policies for small and medium-sized businesses, and to proactively engage policyholders to enable them to continuously improve their risk posture.

Cowbell delivers cyber insurance products tailored to the unique needs of small and medium businesses across the United States. By integrating data and technology into every step of the insurance process, Cowbell has improved the cyber insurance experience for all stakeholders, including agents/brokers, policyholders, insurers and reinsurers.

Using Cowbell, agents can issue customised and standalone policies with robust coverage in minutes. Policyholders get value on day one through a continuous assessment of risk, access to insights to improve their organisation’s risk profile and alerts when new vulnerabilities are identified. Furthermore, capital providers such as insurers and reinsurers benefit from direct access to their risk portfolio — notably, information about the risk covered, including intelligence on how the latest threats impact the overall portfolio.

Marrying robust coverage with cutting edge technology, deep insurance competence and cybersecurity expertise, we believe that Cowbell is on a path to take a leadership position in the cyber insurance market. With the recent development of Cowbell Re and new hires such as Theresa Le (as Head of Claims and Risk Engineering), Dan Palardy (as Lead Actuary) and Joshua Chan (as Chief Technology Officer), we can’t wait to see where Jack, Trent, Rajeev and Prab take the company over the next few years. It was a pleasure to get to know the wider team during our process, as well as the company’s existing investors and our new coinvestors at PruVen, Nyca, Viola and Permira.

If you are interested in a career at Cowbell, take a look at open roles here.