CEO and Co-Founder Yakir Golan: There is a lack of awareness to silent cyber risk exposure within traditional insurance portfolios. Every commercial insurance company needs to manage its cyber exposure even if it does not write affirmative cyber policies
The Kovrr cyber risk modeling company is expanding its recruitment for senior executives from the European and American insurance market. The company has recruited David Clouston, former Interim Head of Catastrophe Risk at Lloyds and now an advisor to multiple global firms on their exposure management process and cyber strategy. The company has also recruited Marco Lo Giudice, PhD, an expert in catastrophe modelling, who is also highly regarded in the London market. From the American market, Kurt Jackson has recently joined the company, in charge of sales in the USA. The company recently raised 5.5 million dollars in seed capital, led by StageOne Ventures, the Spanish Alma Mundi Ventures fund and InnoCells, Banco Sabadell’s innovation arm.
“There is a lack of awareness about the silent cyber risk exposure among many P&C carries” – says Kovrr CEO and Co-Founder Yakir Golan. Every insurance company needs to manage its cyber exposures even if it does not write affirmative cyber policies.
Kovrr was founded in 2017 by Yakir Golan, Avi Bashan and Shalom Bublil. The company started out with a product to assist underwriters in assessing the risk of a single company, and from assessment derived a calculation of the required premium. “Going forward to achieve our mission as a company, we expanded our product, to managing entire insurance portfolios’ cyber exposure. At the same time, we expanded to managing both affirmative cyber portfolios and non-affirmative ones.”, says Golan. The reason for this, he says, is the realization that there is cyber exposure in most commercial insurance books.
By way of example, Golan mentioned the Notpetya cyber-attack, which resulted in insurance companies being forced to compensate insureds under regular non-cyber policies, as the insurance policy covered cyber triggered events.
Kovrr is now working with a number of big insurance companies from the USA, Singapore, Israel and other countries. The company has also started working in collaboration with the software giant, Sapiens, to help them enable their insurance clients to underwrite cyber policies and manage their cyber risk exposure.
Golan estimates that as time goes on the number of cyber-attacks will grow and says “we help companies evaluate and model their entire portfolio by stress testing the impact of events that can start as a result of a cyber attack.”
