Cowbell Cyber appoints David Miles and Varun Badhwar to board

Cowbell Cyber, a start-up focused on artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cyber insurance for small to mid-sized enterprises, has appointed David Miles, co-founder and managing partner at ManchesterStory Group and Varun Badhwar, senior vice president of products, Prisma cloud, at Palo Alto Networks, to its board of directors.

The appointments follow Cowbell Cyber's September 2019 launch, where it announced the industry's first continuous underwriting platform for cyber insurance. ManchesterStory is a venture capital firm partnering with companies in insurtech, fintech and healthcare. It led the seed round for Cowbell Cyber's launch.

"The cyber insurance market is growing at an alarming rate and I am thrilled to welcome both David Miles and Varun Badhwar to Cowbell Cyber's board of directors,” said Jack Kudale, founder and CEO at Cowbell Cyber. “Their wealth of cybersecurity and insurance experience will help us navigate the next steps in our go-to-market strategies.

“David and Varun bring a valuable combination of knowledge and strategic vision needed to position Cowbell Cyber as the leader in a rapidly growing cyber insurance market."

Miles brings nearly 30 years of investment and entrepreneurial experience, including as owner of Miles Capital, a multi-billion dollar insurance company-focused asset management firm. In addition to Miles' investment experience, he brings leadership and operating experience to Cowbell Cyber.

"Because of the evolving nature of cyber risks, we see an opportunity for cyber insurance to lead the disruption of the underwriting process," said Miles. "We are thrilled for ManchesterStory to partner with Cowbell Cyber and support the team in their vision for a ground-breaking approach to underwriting cyber insurance."

Varun Badhwar joins Cowbell Cyber as a serial entrepreneur with a proven track record of building transformative cybersecurity companies. He is most notably known as founder and CEO at RedLock, a cloud threat defence company acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2018. Today, Badhwar leads the Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud offering.

"Companies around the world rely more than ever on the cloud to run and grow their business and the insurance market needs to reflect this shift in the use of technology," said Badhwar. "I have been impressed by Cowbell Cyber's vision for a new cyber insurance model that enables companies of any size to get relevant and accurate cyber coverage. I'm delighted to be helping the team through this journey of disruption."

Using deep learning techniques and actuarial science, Cowbell Cyber identifies the probability of threat exposure and calculates its financial impacts to an organization, enabling brokers to quote and bind policies in minutes. Built on its patent-pending risk-ratings factor, Cowbell Factor, Cowbell Cyber's aims to address the cyber insurability gap for organizations by offering standalone, individualized and comprehensive cyber policies. Cowbell Cyber plans to make its initial cyber insurance policy, Cowbell Prime, available in Q1 2020 to businesses up to $250M in six states: California, Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada and Oregon.

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