UK insurtech Nayms grabs £1.5m seed funding for crypto insurance

London-based insurtech  Nayms has secured £1.5 million in its seed round to launch its insurance-linked smart contract for crypto-related risk. The start-up seeks to insure digital assets through a "collaboration between regulated underwriters/brokers and capital markets".

The funding was led by XBTO, alongside other investors including Coinbase Ventures, Maven11, and Insurtech Gateway.

Nayms uses smart contracts to collateralise cryptocurrency risk with matching crypto-assets, bringing insurance with no FX-risk to a space that is reportedly 96 percent uninsured. It has partnered with MakerDAO to collateralise these 'Smart Insurance Contracts' with their stablecoin Dai allowing it to apply its platform to traditional risk in the wider insurance market.

The start-up will deploy the funding to launch large pilot programmes in preparation for a full launch later in 2021 following graduation from the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) sandbox into a full regulatory license.

It also plans to build its customer base and work on capital market integrations prior to the Series A funding round planned for Q1 2022.

“Nayms is on a mission with our ecosystem of investors, partners, advisors and our growing team to provide brokers with a tradable, transparent, traceable and trusted insurance contract for this emerging risk category of digital assets," said Nayms CEO Dan Roberts.

"We look forward to seeing how the world's brokers start interacting with this technology in the months and years to come. We welcome our new investors who join us at this key time in our company's development. We look forward to an exciting 2021.”

The company's CTO Theodore Georgas added: “This pilot represents a small but significant milestone for Nayms as we move into 2021 with accelerating traction. It is our belief that the problem of scaling insurance protection for the digital asset space will be solved through a collaboration between regulated underwriters/brokers and capital markets. Nayms is building the infrastructure to facilitate this collaboration.”

According to its lead investor, the cryptocurrency market is expected to reach a value of $11 trillion in the next three years. Greg Carson of XBTO sees "insurance as an important spoke of the cryptofinance evolution".

Nayms's first pilot, a digital insurance contract, is placed by Breach Insured. Eyhab Aejaz, CEO of Breach CEO, said: “There is a well-documented shortage of re/insurance capacity available to digital asset risks and in order for Breach to scale our business to new markets and additional products, it is imperative for us to identify complementary sources of re/insurance capacity and collateral.

"Our partnership with Nayms allows Breach to cover complex digital asset risks at scale - similar to how this problem is solved for traditional catastrophic risk insurance in the P&C and Surplus Lines markets.”

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