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October 16, 2020 Thomas Spiller
InsureTech Connect, the world’s leading InsurTech conference, returns in digital form. As the database partner for ITC Magellan™ displays information about the 600+ companies sponsoring or exhibiting at ITC 2020. Attendees will have the platform to search for insurance technology vendors, view our ITC-specific collections, and record notes about vendors. In this post, we focus our attention on cyber. Head over to Magellan’s Oxbow Partners-curated collections to see more.
Cyber continues to be a ‘trending topic’ for the (re)insurance industry. Experts predict that the global cyber security market could be worth ~U$400bn by 2025, a fourfold increase from 2015. Munich Re estimates that the (re)insurance share of this will be in excess of ~U$20bn, up from ~U$7bn in 2020. Multiple factors are driving this growth. This includes the vast availability of data that is generated each day, the growing number of attacks as well as the heightened awareness of individuals and businesses to the severity of breaches. Similarly, the rapid increase in data privacy laws worldwide has led to businesses insuring themselves against the potential losses from a cyber leak.
Covid-19 has only accelerated this. In a matter of weeks, the ‘work-from-home’ segment of the UK labour market increased from 5% to 45%, drastically changing companies and individuals cyber risk profiles. This has forced (re)insures to consider the solutions and products that they can offer their customers.
Despite this, the threat of cyber is still not well understood across the industry. Events are hard to define, losses hard to predict, and (re)insurers typically lack historical context to be able to price cyber effectively with traditional pricing methods. (Re)insurers are not yet cyber security specialists, to the same extent in which many (re)insurers are experts in flood or bushfire loss. It is unlikely that the insurance industry in the short term, will develop the technical solutions that are currently provided by other carriers in the market. As a result of this, we are seeing a growing number of (re)insurers seek the help of specialist partners such as the 8 companies on this list.
The future of insurance is sometimes discussed as an evolution from protecting assets from an insurable event, to predicting and finally preventing events from occurring. Cyber fits this thinking and the following 8 ITC attendees can enable (re)insurers to protect their customers from cyber threats and maybe even prevent them from occurring in the first place.
Founded: 2018
Company Stage: Scale Up
Offices: US (HO), UK & Estonia
Target client: Insurer, MGA, Broker & Reinsurer
Revenue/ FTE: £10-15m / 80
CyberCube is a cyber risk analytics company, that offers a SaaS platform to (re)insurers for modelling cyber risk. With the mission to “deliver the world’s leading cyber risk analytics”, the platform combines publicly available data with proprietary insights to provide underwriters with actionable insights, enabling them to understand and price cyber risks more accurately.
The business was born in 2015 as an R&D project out of one of the world’s leading cybersecurity companies, Symantec, before launching as an independent venture in early 2018. CyberCube insights continue to benefit from its ongoing strategic partnership with Symantec and the company has displayed rapid growth since coming out of “stealth” mode, as evident by their FTE count doubling in each of the past two years.
CyberCube’s team of data scientists, cyber security experts, underwriters and actuaries enables the company to keep pace with the ever-changing threat of cyber. The company has established partnerships with many global players including Aon, Chubb, Guy Carpenter, Hiscox and Munich Re. Pascal Millaire, CEO, has previously noted that around 40% of all cyber insurance premium in the US is underwritten by their clients.
CyberCube was a member of our 2020 InsurTech Impact 25.
To find out more read our Bitesize profile of CyberCube or Q&A with CyberCube.
Founded: 2015
Company Stage: Start up
Offices: UK (HO)
Target client: Insurer & Broker
Revenue / FTE: £0 – 4m / 10 – 20
DynaRisk combines personal risk factors, external data, and algorithms to build their proprietary ‘Cyber Security Score’ that determines the cyber threat for an individual, home or corporate. Claimed as the world’s first of its kind, the score considers over 70 risk factors and is designed to help individuals and businesses understand how safe their online footprint is and what can be done to improve their cyber security.
Insurers can add DynaRisk’s ‘Cyber Security Score’ to any stage of the value chain, providing end customers a more valuable cyber policy whilst reducing claimable events. In addition, the DynaRisk cyber helpline enables insurers to provide expert advice to customers, from virus remediation to security alerts and responses to data breaches.
Chubb has an existing partnership with DynaRisk to offer loss mitigation services to all Cyber Enterprise Risk Management policyholders in the UK and Ireland. Other DynaRisk partners include Hiscox and Delta Insurance.
Founded: 2017
Company Stage: Start up
Offices: Israel (HO), UK & US
Target client: Insurer & Reinsurer
Revenue / FTE: £1-5m / 21
Kovrr is a data driven cyber risk modelling company that helps (re)insurers financially quantify and manage cyber risk. Their platform has the capability to be integrated across the insurance value chain including underwriting, where it can provide actionable insights that decrease the need for pre-bind interaction with clients. This is achieved by assessing the robustness of a company’s cyber policy and vulnerability to a cyber-attack, based on existing security controls and the preventative measures that the company has in place.
Kovrr can also run loss simulations for existing portfolios, calculating potential exposure using a catalogue of more than 100,000 events of varying levels of severity.
Kovrr was earlier this year accepted in the fourth cohort of the Lloyd’s Lab, the insurance technology accelerator operated by Lloyds of London. With input from Lloyd market syndicates, Kovrr developed ‘CRA-Zones™’ a framework to measure and understand catastrophic risk exposure. The framework was developed based on analysis of millions of cyber events across the globe.
Founded in 2017, Kovrr currently operates in Israel, Asia, Europe, US and Latin America.
The company was a member of our 2020 InsurTech Impact 25.
Founded: 2014
Company Stage: Scale Up
Offices: UK (HO) & US
Target client: Insurer, MGA, Broker & Reinsurer
Revenue / FTE: £0 – 5m / 11-50
Corax is a cyber risk modelling and prediction platform, that uses proprietary data to calculate an organisations cyber hygiene score. This includes their susceptibility to cyber breaches and the severity of business interruption if a breach occurred. Corax is primarily used by (re)insurance carriers to accurately underwrite and manage cyber exposure across the entire insurance value chain, and by brokers and agents to provide clients with precise cyber risk assessment and cover recommendations.
The company leverages security and technology resilience data from “more than 10 million interconnect companies” and markets itself as the world’s leading and largest source of cyber exposure data. Its proprietary database grows by over 100,000 companies each day to ensure Corax continues to have “the world’s most comprehensive modelled view on cyber risk”.
Corax experienced rapid market adoption since being launched commercially in 2017, since growing to over 200 users worldwide. Notable clients include QBE, Nationwide, JLT, WillisRe and even the London Police.
Founded: 2019
Company Stage: Scale Up
Offices: US (HO)
Revenue / FTE: £10 – 15m / 26 – 100
Powered by AI, Cowbell Cyber is an underwriting platform that maps and quantifies cyber risk exposure. Designed specifically for small to medium sized businesses with yearly revenue up to U$250m, Cowbell Cybers offers standalone, individualised policies with up to U$15m worth of protection. The continuous underwriting platform condenses the buying process down to less than 5 minutes.
In September this year, Cowbell launched their second cyber insurance product, Prime 250, encompassing 25 different covers that addresses multiple types of cyber risk. The product was designed to remove the ambiguity of a one size fits all policy, empowering customers and brokers to tailor policies to individual circumstances.
Currently only available in the United States, Cowbell is licensed in 33 US states and is backed by Munich Re and Renaissance Re, amongst others.
Founded: 2017
Company Stage: Scale Up
Offices: US (HO)
Revenue / FTE: £30 -33m / 101 – 200
Built on advanced data science and AI, Corvus provides commercial insurance products and policies aimed at protecting and enabling policyholders to better predict and prevent loss. The proprietary ‘Corvus Score’ measures companies’ IT security, which informs Corvus’s underwriting process and the products that they offer their clients. Corvus provides loss prevention reports to each policyholder to inform them of their critical cyber risk areas and actionable steps that they can take to minimise these risks.
The company was founded in 2017, receiving its first outside funding by Bain Capital Ventures in 2018 before launching their first product later that year. Corvus products are primarily underwritten by Argo Insurance & the Hudson Insurance Group.
Earlier this year Corvus announced it raised U$32m in series B funding led by Telstra Ventures in anticipation of further growth, bringing the total raised to U$46m.
Founded: 2016
Company Stage: Start up
Offices: US (HO) & UK
Target client: Insurer & Reinsurer
Revenue / FTE: £100k – 1m / 12
Zeguro is a platform that helps businesses identify, mitigate and insure themselves against cyber risks. Aimed at small to mid-sized businesses, the company’s goal is to simplify cybersecurity management and streamline the cyber insurance buying process.
The platform, referred to internally as the ‘virtual cybersecurity officer’ has three main roles;
The customisable and integrated solutions include a suite of cyber tools for risk mitigation, which if utilised reduces the company’s monthly cyber insurance premium.
Zeguro has received investment from QBE and Plug and Play, amongst others and is the cyber specialist underwriter for HSB and Munich Re.
To find out more read our Bitesize profile of Zeguro.
Founded: 2007
Company Stage: Scale Up
Offices: US (HO)
Target client: Insurer & Reinsurer
Revenue / FTE: £1 – 4m / 1-50
Coalition, a cyber risk management platform, combines comprehensive insurance products with cybersecurity tools to help businesses better manage their cyber risk. Coalition is backed by Swiss Re, Argo Group and Lloyd’s of London and operates across all North America.
The platform provides customers cybersecurity tools such as threat intelligence services and security alerts, in addition to their insurance products and expert guidance. Coalition offers two levels of coverage, first and third-party liability, that are claimed to both provide features well and above industry standard.
Coalition is growing rapidly and currently serves more than 10,000 customers at an insured value of U$12 billion+. The company had a U$90m Series C funding round in May and was listed as one of Forbes’ ‘Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2020’.
About the author
Thomas Spiller, Senior Manager
Tom is a Senior Manager at Oxbow Partners and has a range of experience across strategy, growth, digital and operating model projects in Europe, the UK and the London Market. Prior to Oxbow Partners, Tom spent three years working in the Strategy team at Suncorp, Australia’s largest general insurer. Tom has dual bachelor’s degrees in Economics and History from the University of Queensland.
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