Announcing our $13M Series A and how we’re redesigning cyber insurance
At-Bay provides cyber insurance for the digital age.
18 Months ago, we set out to solve a really complex problem — how to price cyber risk — that we believe has deep implications on insurance, security, and how willingly businesses embrace technology. Don’t give me that 🙄, until you read this.
Today, we announce a $13m series A investment by Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Yoni Cheifetz of LightSpeed and Shlomo Kramer, that bring us to a total of $19m in funding (For more details on the announcement, click here).
We are privileged to have such exceptional investors share our vision and honored by the trust they place in our team. Since we launched four months ago, we’ve been working with thoughtful and forward thinking brokers in the Bay Area to provide their clients with the risk management program they deserve.
We’re even more excited to share with you early results and lessons from the work we’ve done so far:
Underwriting with no information
Carriers underwrite large cyber insurance limits for complex organizations with almost no information from clients. We found that clients only answer 12 questions on an average application form, less than 16% of all questions asked. At the same time, average expected quote turn-around time is 3 days. In these conditions, it’s hard to thoughtfully underwrite complex risks.
Cyber Application forms are submitted mostly unanswered, even for complex risks
It’s a good thing we ask machines and not people.
We believe machines can provide better information to underwrite digital risks, and with less friction from the user. Our reconnaissance engine maps out all of a client’s externally-facing technology assets, and runs each one against thousands of vulnerabilities, updated weekly to stay ahead of the newest attacks.
We leverage our technical data collection to differentiate between otherwise similar risks. Therefore, we can give better companies better coverage and rates, and help the lesser improve their security
All of the technology assets that are visible to the internet are part of the public digital footprint of a company, also known as its attack surface. We have discovered a strong correlation between a company’s digital footprint index — a measure of the size of a company’s attack surface — and its expected risk of breach.
A shared mission to avoid loss
We help companies stay safe. In our first four months in the market, our brokers launched security scans on 229 of their companies. We’ve discovered and helped them remediate 874 vulnerabilities, 21 of which are classified as critical.
66 of those companies (29%) didn’t have basic, and free to install, email protection measures configured. In various instances, we’ve helped clients setup better email protection, and later lowered their quoted premiums, and expanded their social engineering and financial fraud coverage.
Sometimes we find companies with serious security issues. We hate when it happens (about 12% of cases), but our first priority at that point is to help our prospective clients become safe. In these cases, we give our brokers a detailed security assessment and make our security experts available to the client for technical support. Once critical issues are fixed, we are happy to offer them insurance coverage and our on-going risk management support.
Helping brokers assess client exposure
Not every breach is the same. Even within a company, different breach scenarios can cause costs to vary widely. We’ve built a data breach exposure calculator, to help with exactly that. We let brokers and risk managers play with different variables to test their costs under multiple breach scenarios. We provide explanations of the different costs, their drivers, and their likelihoods to help you make sense of it all. And you can download it in PowerPoint format to easily incorporate in your decks. Take it for a spin!
With this new funding and support from our investors, we plan to develop a deeper understanding of cyber risk, and translate it into better insurance products for our clients and broker partners. In conjunction, our cyber security services team will continue to grow to help customers stay one step ahead of attackers, and avoid loss, every day. We’ve received great feedback from our partners in the Bay Area, and are excited to build new partnerships with brokers and clients across the country.
We are on a mission to empower our clients to embrace technology, and take on tomorrow fearlessly. We are there to provide them peace of mind in the face of complexity — to work with them, year-round to control and avoid risk. Because in a fast-changing digital world, the insurance policy is just the start. Come work with us!
