2023-09-19 04:00:00
“Faced with a growing cyber risk, the entire European economic fabric must be strengthened”, insists Jules Veyrat, CEO and co-founder of Stoïk. His start-up is one of the rare business insurance companies to have specialized in cybersecurity from the start. Two and a half years after its creation in France, it has just completed a fundraising of 10 million euros (8.5 million in equity versus 1.5 million in debt).
This is not the first time that the French insurtech has attracted investors. In total, it has raised 25 million euros since it marketed its insurance policies and IT protection tools to its French clients. In a difficult context for obtaining financing, for its latest fundraising it called on the investment funds Munich Re Ventures and Opera Tech Ventures, as well as two investors already involved, Andreessen Horowitz and Alven.
A more mature German market
With its new capital and an already solidly established presence with 2,000 French corporate clients, Stoïk opened an office in Cologne to open up to a German market whose number of SMEs, estimated at 2.5 million, looks promising. Through insurance brokers, in direct contact with this type of company, insurtech hopes to sell them its offer designed as a diptych. On the one hand, an insurance policy that covers the financial damage caused by cyberattacks to companies, and on the other hand, the sale of expertise and security software developed internally to protect these companies from threats.
“This makes the offer more attractive: not only do we insure you, but we also help you protect yourself, explains Jules Veyrat. And for our part, we control our risk better because we are dealing with policyholders who will, on average, be attacked less than others.” A promise that could therefore appeal to many German companies, while examples of cyberattacks proliferate in the private and public sectors, particularly across the Rhine. “I don’t think that the German market is more or less affected than the French market but, from my perception, it is a market which is a little more mature in terms of cybersecurity for SMEs and mid-sized companies and where there are the most competition in cybersecurity insurance”adds the CEO of Stoïk.
“Becoming the European leader”
He also believes that this new market will become “fast enough” the biggest asset of his start-up, despite a historic presence in France. To make this dream a reality, Jules Veyrat poached Franziska Geier from its German competitor Markel, where she led the insurer’s European strategy. At Stoïk, she will manage the company’s brand new office in Cologne, which seven employees will have joined before the end of the year “and around fifteen by the end of next year”.
Beyond exporting their activity to a new territory, insurtech leaders are eyeing, through this fundraising and the inauguration of these German districts, the opportunity for a wider opening to Europe. “One of the reasons that push us to go to Germany is that, if we have taken a fairly obvious leading position in our sector on the French market, our ambition is to become European leader and we tell our customers this. investors from the beginning.“In the short term, Stoïk’s teams will therefore focus on Germany before taking a closer look at expansion in continental Europe, Jules Veyrat listing the Benelux, SuisseAustria, Southern Europe and the Nordic countries.
An evolving offer
Until then, Stoïk’s offer will become clearer as it is distributed. For the moment, insurtech can cover a total of up to 5 million euros in losses per customer and offers three guarantees in a cybersecurity context: “cover technical crisis management, damage suffered by the insured, in particular the loss represented by not working for a week, and damage caused by the insured to third parties”. In the case of a ransomware attack, the startup can authorize “last resort” his client to pay a ransom to recover his data and assume financial responsibility for him.
To avoid reaching this costly and complex stage, Jules Veyrat explains providing tools to “prevent intrusion into a computer system, by two means: by limiting technical vulnerabilities and human vulnerabilities”. Policyholders therefore see their local and cloud infrastructures automatically scanned on a weekly basis and their employees subjected to training or phishing awareness campaigns.
“Our approach is to use things that cybercriminals can use but to be more reactive than them”, indicates the CEO of Stoïk, adding that his company uses a number of evolving open source tools and regularly keeps abreast of the latest vulnerabilities. With, always in its sights, the leitmotif of one step ahead to protect its customers and its own business model.
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