Cybersecurity insurance company Coalition raises $175M to secure the modern enterprise

Coalition, an enterprise-grade cybersecurity platform that specializes in insurance, has raised $175 million in a round of funding led by Index Ventures. The raise comes as hacks and breaches have surged due in large part to the pandemic as the world rapidly transitioned to remote work in 2020.

Founded out of San Francisco in 2017, Coalition offers a range of cybersecurity tools spanning credential monitoring, endpoint detection and response (EDR), patch management, training, and more. However, the company’s core raison d’être lies in the insurance realm, where it offers to protect the value of businesses including financial, intangible, and tangible damage for up to $15 million.

“While many insurance companies only assist after a claim is reported, we proactively work with our clients to prevent them from happening in the first place and contain them when they do,” Coaltion CEO and cofounder Joshua Motta told VentureBeat.

That’s not to say that Coalition offers a fully exhaustive cybersecurity platform, but by stretching beyond insurance the company is striving to be a stickier proposition for clients, one that uses technology and data to properly assess its clients’ security risk as part of their insurance policy.

“Our cyber risk-management platform provides automated security alerts, threat intelligence, expert guidance, and cybersecurity tools to help businesses remain resilient in the face of cyberattacks, and are designed to complement other third-party security software and services an organization might use,” Motta added.

Coalition’s platform aggregates and analyzes data from every internet-enabled device inside a company, scanning its policyholders’ assets to identify and alert them of potential vulnerabilities.

“Combined with our proprietary claims data, we can — with a high degree of accuracy — predict not only the likelihood an organization will experience a cyber loss, but also model the severity, be it a ransomware, social engineering, or data breach-related loss,” Motta said. “These insights have been invaluable, and the frequency of loss reported by our policyholders is one-quarter the frequency reported across the broader cyber insurance market.”

Additionally, Coalition also offers APIs to customers and partners to integrate its insurance products and security data into their platforms to enable their own customers to manage cyber risks or buy insurance.

Intangible

Prior to now, Coalition had raised around $140 million, and with a fresh $175 million in the bank — valuing the company at $1.75 billion — the company plans to launch several new insurance products to “address a range of risks facing the modern enterprise,” according to Motta, “many of which are not well covered by standard business insurance policies.”

Additionally, Motta said that it plans to launch new software products that enable organizations to “proactively manage risk.”

“Today, an increasing number of organizations derive the majority of their value from intangible assets — the knowledge and abilities of their employees, intellectual property, data, among others,” Motta explained. “Standard business insurance policies, on the other hand, tend to focus on the protection of an organization’s tangible assets, which has created an opportunity for specialty insurers to introduce relatively new products including cyber, management liability, and so on. We believe there is a significant opportunity to continue to innovate in this space, utilizing the same technology-driven underwriting approach we’ve pioneered in cyber to underwrite a broader set of risks faced by the modern enterprise.”

While Coalition doesn’t reveal any of its insurance policyholders as it could “expose them to additional risk,” according to Motta, it has revealed a number of SaaS enterprise customers including Verizon, Accenture, Kleiner Perkins, and Hewlett Packard.

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