Meet the insurtech: Secondsight
One of the scariest horror movie devices is “the call is coming from inside the house.” It’s a principle that can apply to cybersecurity as well. That’s why SecondSight, a digital asset inventory company that aims to make companies more insurable, does its work from inside companies’ firewalls – in effect, “inside the house.”
“Until the insurance industry can model inside the firewall risk, it will always have an imperfect view of the real digital risk. That was our opening problem statement,” said Reuben Vanderventer, CEO of SecondSight. Most risk quantification for the past 15 to 20 years has been done outside the insured party’s firewall by scanning open ports and networks, he added. “Our view is that only gives you a portion of all the information you need to model the total and true real risk.”
SecondSight uses machine learning and AI to discover and catalog all of a client company’s digital assets, then monitor those assets over time. “This gives us a time series of how digital assets are growing, contracting and sharing information amongst themselves,” said Vanderventer.
The digital assets within an enterprise, behind its cyber firewalls, are the items at risk that need to be insured. Having time series information “allows you to project unplanned liabilities,” Vanderventer added. “If a certain software goes down, like your CRM, or for whatever reason you get locked out – if it gets ransomed – what’s the impact of that specific software on your P&L?”
Insurers tend to focus on the likelihood of a loss occurring, according to Vanderventer, and they write policies based on that. “We are bringing to the industry a first of its kind, the ability to do both inside the firewall and outside the firewall risk modeling, that maps to an emerging category referred to as risk quantification. That’s the category we live in,” he said.
Vanderventer and the founding team established Secondsight in 2018, having previously worked for Allstate building its analytical data science capabilities and its Drivewise telematics program.
“Getting to watch auto, property and casualty, and personal lines evolve from people telling underwriters, brokers and agents how good a driver they are and what their driving behaviors were, to the machines telling the underwriters, I looked at what other insurance lines would go through that level of evolution,” said Vanderventer. “The most obvious one was cyber insurance, where there has to be telematics on the business that helps the underwriting teams understand the real risks both inside and outside the firewall.”
In the first and second quarters of this year, Secondsight built self-service and guided capabilities that allow users to catalog assets themselves without assistance. In October, the company announced it raised $3 million in seed funding, so it is poised to grow significantly in the next 12 to 18 months, according to Vanderventer.
With that growth, Secondsight expects to reduce cybersecurity risks by insuring companies that could not previously get coverage. “We have carriers coming in to support the data and information we’re providing by giving things like preferred coverage and better retention limits,” said Vanderventer. “That is an indication we’re actually helping to evolve the industry.”
