Cowbell Cyber announced a $100 million Series B on Tuesday, bringing its total funding to more than $120 million. The round was led by Anthemis Group and also included Permira, PruVen Capital, NYCA Partners, Viola Fintech and other existing investors.
Co-founded by CEO Jack Kudale in 2019, Cowbell Cyber provides cyber insurance to small- and medium-sized businesses that generate up to $250 million in annual revenue.
The Pleasanton-based startup raised a $20 million Series A almost exactly one year ago and currently has 138 employees, a number it wants to get up to 200 this year with a focus on hiring in engineering, data science, and incident preparedness and response.
Cyber attacks have impacted some of the most well-resourced companies.
Just last year there were several high profile incidents. Colonial Pipeline, the largest fuel supplier in the country, was forced to shut down and pay more than $4 million-worth of bitcoin as a ransom. And the SolarWinds breach compromised anywhere between 30,000 to 250,000 Microsoft Exchange customers. Howard University also had to briefly shut down due to a ransomware attack.
Small- and medium-sized businesses spent up to $50,000 on average dealing with cybersecurity incidents in 2020 across Europe and North America, according to Statista, and in the US alone, data breaches have increased more than six-fold since 2005.
Cowbell Cyber helps its customers with continuous risk monitoring and also assesses a company's risk to price out its premiums.
"A good amount of premiums will be based upon things such as the industry that they operate in, the revenue and the employees," Kudale told the Business Times last year. "But also a pretty good part of the premium will be based upon the cyber risk of their IT infrastructure, the vulnerabilities in the infrastructure, the strength and weaknesses of their infrastructure and whether it’s network security, endpoint cloud security and fund transfer."
The company says its gross written premium increased 40-fold in 2021, and that it expects to triple its policyholder base to 35,000 this year.
It also provides risk assessment to any business for free. The company told me it does have plans for an international expansion in the near future.
A couple of other Bay Area cyber insurance startups each raised $205 million last year in later stage rounds: Coalition raised a Series E and At-Bay raised a Series D, according to Crunchbase.
