Cyber insurer Resilience raises $100M in expansion bid

Dive Brief:

Cyber insurance provider Resilience secured $100 million in an equity financing round, raising capital through the sale of shares, the company announced Monday.
The insurer will use the funding to accelerate the San Francisco-based company’s global expansion and scale the adoption of a recently-launched platform designed to help companies manage their cyber risks, according to a press release.
The increase of ransomware shows that many companies’ existing cybersecurity and cyber insurance practices don’t go far enough, Resilience CEO Vishaal Hariprasad said in the release. Businesses “need a way to look at their cyber risk in an integrated, economically-efficient, and predictable manner,” he said.

Dive Insight:

With ransomware attacks, criminals use malicious software to prevent companies from accessing their own computer files, systems or networks, and they demand the payment of a ransom to have such access restored. Such attacks can also involve a threat to leak sensitive data to the public internet.

In May, Resilience reported that ransomware claims spiked 300% from the third quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of this year.

During the same month, Corvus, another cyber insurer, reported a “sudden global explosion” in the frequency of ransomware attacks during the early months of 2023, with 452 new victims’ data appearing on dark web sites in March.

“Left unchecked, ransomware will continue to flourish,” Corvus CISO Jason Rebholz said in a press release at the time. Despite the rise in observed activity, the rate of claims at Corvus has continued to trend downward this year, the company said.

About 78% of Resilience’s clients impacted by ransomware last year were able to avoid paying a ransom to resolve an incident, according to the company’s May report.

Resilience favors a “holistic” approach to managing cybersecurity risks that involves using a combination of insurance and technology services, with a focus on building continuous engagement among CFOs, chief information security officers and risk officers.

“Cybersecurity decisions need to be business decisions, and I think the CFO needs to set the priority and example for the company,” Hariprasad previously told CFO Dive.

To date, the company has raised over $200 million in funding, according to a spokesperson. The latest funding round was led by Toronto-based Intact Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Intact Financial Corporation.