Closing Series C, Raising $74M in 2020 and Bringing Together the Best in Insurance and Technology

There are a lot of great security companies out there. And a lot of great insurance companies. But when an insurance company tries to hire a security company to answer a question fundamental to insurance—how to underwrite—they come up with, well, meh…

These are two very different industries, with different talent, different skills and different DNA. It is unreasonable to expect the insurance company to trust an outsider’s opinion, data and algorithms to do a job they have been doing for decades—determining how to price risk. It is impossible to expect a security company to understand the requirements, limitations and priorities of insurance distribution and to design solutions that can be sold by a broker.

We built At-Bay around a core thesis: only vertical integration of security and insurance into a single organization can unlock the opportunity in cyber insurance. In practice, this means bringing people from very different disciplines to collaborate on a single mission. It is no small feat, few have even tried.

Today we announced a $34 million Series C round—our second financing round in nine months—for a total of $74 million raised this year. How have we been able to grow so quickly and raise significant funding despite a global pandemic, while taking on the challenge of melding security and insurance?

The answer is our amazing team. We built a culture of collaboration and curiosity. Our people are generous in sharing their knowledge and eager to learn from others. They care deeply for one another, and for the company that we are building together. The fundraising news is exciting, but it mostly serves to reflect At-Bay’s true source of pride: Our tight-knit team. 

I want to talk a little bit about how that team has grown and flourished.

Over the past year, long time industry leaders like Tara Bodden joined to serve as our General Counsel and Head of Claims and Kristie Felton joined to lead our digital partnerships. Ayelet Kutner left her job as head of engineering for a public cyber security company to join as our CTO and GM Israel.

But the growth of our team has not been limited to the C-suite. We almost tripled this year to 75 employees, adding incredible talent across underwriting, HR, marketing, claims, data science, actuary, research, engineering and product. At-Bay now has a presence in San Francisco, Tel Aviv, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and Dallas.

Together, our team is building the future of insurance in a digital age. As one team member puts it, we think about commercial insurance from a hacker’s perspective.

But the truth is that I can only give you my own personal vantage point. This company and its culture are created by all of us, and so I wanted to let some of the team tell the At-Bay story from their perspective.

Rae Haynes, Senior Underwriter, New York

The idea of underwriting cyber insurance from a “hacker’s perspective” really resonated with me when I heard about At-Bay. I had been working at a leading commercial insurance company, and was excited to join an early-stage startup with unlimited potential for growth. Since I joined At-Bay in mid-2019, the underwriting team has grown fourfold. Seeing the evolution of our broker platform and underwriting system is just amazing. It is very satisfying being at a company where everyone shows the same level of dedication every day to provide top notch service and products to our clients who love working with us. Our success is deeply correlated to the talented and passionate people we hire.

Madison Williamson, Associate Product Manager, New York 

Every At-Bay employee is here to see every deal through and get every claim resolved. We are not a group of people who say “that’s not my problem” or “that’s not how everyone else does it.” Our diversity of experiences, backgrounds, and specialties creates an intellectual friction and that leads to better products. No one here takes things at face value. We’re looking under the hood, trying to design a better way so that we can help businesses stay on track. Innovation is woven into the company’s DNA.

Kfir Cohen, Software Engineer, Tel Aviv

It can be difficult to feel connected to your coworkers while working from home. At-Bay has put a huge emphasis on building effective communication channels among our teams, and between our teams and customers. We’ve also baked these communication approaches into our products, decreasing our response time with clients. As we bring on more senior engineers, I’m looking forward to participating in even more knowledge sharing as we continue to build cutting-edge technologies. 

Dina Tennekoon, Marketing Manager, San Francisco

A little over a year ago, I met At-Bay’s Head of Insurance Brett Sadoff. We chatted about the burden of manual processes throughout the commercial insurance industry and how At-Bay’s technology was changing the field. At-Bay had a small team full of the smartest engineers and lawyers and needed help getting marketing off the ground. A team that strongly embraced new ideas, I saw an opportunity to run with my own creativity. I later met with Rotem, the CEO, who expressed his concern for the technology-driven world and how we need to be setting the example for the future of cyber security. I realized that this was bigger than providing insurance for clients. It was about creating standards and holding each part of the chain accountable for stopping cyber attacks before they happen—and that mission is what confirmed my decision to be part of this team. 

Caitlin Aylward, API Product Manager, San Francisco

When I joined At-Bay two years ago as a product manager, there were only 15 people at the company. Even though the company has grown fivefold since then, I continue to be impressed and inspired by the collective talent, excitement, and motivation to make a difference. From the very beginning, it felt like a welcoming place to grow professionally and build something I was proud of. I didn’t come from an insurance background, but At-Bay provided a supportive and collaborative environment for me to focus on learning and building. In the last year, we’ve managed to stay a really close-knit company despite working from home. But I’m most proud of seeing the positive impact our products and features have on the way brokers access insurance and understand complicated risks. 

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We are still relatively early in our journey to redesign insurance—but we are making gains rapidly.  

In addition to raising $74 million over the last year, we’ve grown annualized premium revenue, total number of insureds and total liabilities by 600%. At the same time, it’s become clear our modern approach to risk management is working—we reduced the frequency of ransomware claims in our portfolio by more than 4X compared to our peers. (more on this in the near future).

The next two years at At-Bay will be the most exciting time to work at a fast-growing startup. Your contribution as part of a small but successful team can have an outsized impact on both the company and the market. If you’re coming from a technology background, you have a chance to build tools that empower businesses to manage cyber risk confidently. If you’re coming from insurance, you have an opportunity to redesign an insurance provider from the ground up—armed with an incredible engineering organization—to stretch your knowledge and experience beyond normalized industry constraints. Together, we can solve problems we have previously been taught to take for granted.

We’re most excited about what comes next. We are building the insurance provider that we know our clients need, and we have the resources to do it. Are you ready to join us on this mission?