Founded in 2021 by Joel Lee and Simeon Tan, two former Booz Allen Hamilton cybersecurity consultants, Protos Labs is a Singaporean startup that helps insurance companies and general enterprises accurately quantify their cyber risk exposure and reduce security breaches through its monitoring services.
According to cybersecurity firm Bitdefender’s 2020 Consumer Threat Landscape Report, there was a 485% year-on-year jump in ransomware attacks that year. As cyber attacks pose an ever growing threat to a company’s digital assets, its insurers could potentially suffer losses driven by cyber risk insurance claims.
Underwriting cyber risk, which is an assessment of risks when defining an insurance policy, has cost implications for insurers. When insurers underestimate the risks associated with coverage, they could end up making payouts in excess of the premiums collected.
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Protos Labs’ proprietary cloud-based cyber risk intelligence platform, Nexus, quantifies cyber risk exposure for the insurer’s enterprise policyholders by assessing the organization’s cyber defences as well as identifying potential threats through statistical modeling.
CEO and co-founder Lee explains how the company differentiates itself from other cybersecurity providers with its in-depth risk assessments. “Nexus analyzes thousands of threats for each policyholder and leverages threat modeling techniques to break down each threat into its component parts for accurate analysis, which in turn informs right-sized risk estimation,” he said.
Protos Labs’ software will be able to provide insurers statistics, such as average annual loss and estimated maximum loss, to help them optimally price premiums and boost bottom lines. Additionally, Nexus has a digital monitoring feature to minimize security breaches for policyholders who have purchased cyber insurance policies with Protos Labs’ insurers.
Additionally, Protos Labs has built its own database using data gathered from cyber attacks and breaches in Asia to produce its analytical insights as opposed to the use of existing data sets largely collated from the United States and Europe. “Both event frequency and cost components in Asia can vary greatly from the West. Having an Asia-specific dataset allows insurers to make more accurate premium pricing decisions,” Lee said.
Over the past year, Protos Labs has built partnerships with the likes of FWD and Starburst Holdings, and is currently in discussions with other leading insurers and reinsurers in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. The company is currently raising its first funding, which it aims to close by Q1 2022.
Protos Labs was the winner of the Alibaba Cloud x KrASIA Global Startup Accelerator joint SG-TH Demo Day, which was held on January 10.