CowbellThe four-year-old company, formerly known as Cowbell Cyber, which provides cyber threat monitoring and insurance to help clients cover costs in the event of a data breach or ransomware payment, has had a banner year, growing 49% so far, and year-over-year growth isn't slowing down anytime soon. Slowdown.
Today, the Pleasanton, California-based company announced that it has raised another $25 million round of funding from Prosperity7Ventures, the diversified growth fund of Aramco Ventures, itself a subsidiary of Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco. This is notable because Aramco itself has been the target and victim of major cyberattacks, including the historicmaximumof cyberattacks.
In response to a question emailed by a VentureBeat spokesperson, Cowbell co-founder and CEO Jack Kudale wrote, "The platform monitors 38 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), processing 15TB of standardized data and 12B+ cumulative signals."
Cowbell offers a wide range of products designed to meet the changing needs and scale of operations of our customers' organizations, from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to large corporations and multinational conglomerates.
At a high level, Cowbell's Adaptive Cyber Insurance aligns cyber insurance coverage and pricing with an organization's changing cyber risk profile through continuous, automated risk assessment, risk reduction incentives and closed-loop risk management.
Source Note: The image is generated by AI, and the image is authorized by Midjourney
Cowbell monitors customer networks for intrusions and tests their network readiness through artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) algorithms that examine more than 1,000 qualities about a customer's network and software.
In April of this year, the company launched MooGPT, itsFirstA GPT-powered generative AI conversational assistant that helps customers quickly answer questions about Cowbell Cyber Insurance policies and risk assessments.
Cowbell's AI/ML platform is capable of scoring customer network systems on a scale from 1 to 100 in eight categories that could be targeted.
These include cybersecurity, cloud security, endpoint security, dark intelligence, money transfer mechanisms and processes, cyber ransom prevention and preparedness, compliance and supply chain.
These scores are known as Cowbell Factors, and together they form "a rating index that helps to assess an organization's cyber risk and therefore the appropriate insurance coverage."
Customers can view their Cowbell Factors scores and recommendations on how to improve them in an at-a-glance dashboard called Cowbell Insights.
Ransomware attacks are understood to be increasing rapidly, up 1,531 TP3T from a year ago, with "small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in hard-hit industries, including healthcare and manufacturing, being the primary targets."
The sheer number of such cyberattacks - in which hackers use malware to seize control of a victimized company's computer systems and/or data and hold them hostage in exchange for ransom in untraceable cryptocurrency deposits - is so great that experts are even advising small and medium-sized businesses to accept them as inevitable.
But Cowbell argues that even in this case, the cost that organizations pay to retrieve systems and data from attackers should be lower.
As a result, the company asserts that "Cowbell's specialized risk engineering and claims management services have stopped extortion payments for more than 741 TP3T, and when ransom payments must be made, the ransom is reduced to an average of 261 TP3T of the initial demand."