Riskwolf, a Swiss Insurtech startup, has been awarded an Innovation project grant with the Swiss Accelerator program supported by Innosuisse. The program is aimed at helping promising startups scale their businesses and make them attractive for advanced stage investors.

Riskwolf plans to use the funds to enhance its cloud coverage product, cloudINSURE, which will offer parametric protection for enterprises in case of cloud downtime. The platform will be fully automated, allowing for an immediate claim payout once the claim trigger is hit.

The need for cloud downtime insurance is becoming increasingly important as nearly every business will run their IT in the cloud by 2030. Failures at third-party cloud, co-location, and hosting providers are now the second most commonly cited reason for IT service failure. For instance, the cost of downtime is estimated to be up to $5 million per hour for high-risk businesses in industries such as banking and finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.

Existing solutions in most of Cyber insurance offerings only tackle part of the issues – on-premise issues and outages caused by cyber attacks. All other cloud outage related losses are excluded or not fully protected.

Riskwolf wants to facilitate the protection of cloud assets by extending the current Cyber insurance offering with an additional critical element – Cloud downtime insurance.

The Swiss Accelerator Program supported by Innosuisse will help Riskwolf enhance its offering with a distinct B2B enterprise parametric service to insurers. This service is based on three core capabilities: real-time processes and dynamic risk modeling fit for next-generation insurance solutions, proprietary mixture of public data, own measurements and experts knowledge, and unique combination of knowledge for digital risks and actuarial science.

The timing for Riskwolf’s innovation is right as businesses move to the cloud, and new digital players (fintech, online commerce) only support digital channels requiring 24-hour connectivity. In mature economies, downtime protection will eventually be mandated due to competition, regulation, and consumer rights.

There is also an unmet demand for cyber protection, and insurance rates are rising, leaving businesses and individuals with a protection gap when their cloud provider is out.

Featured image credit: Edited from freepik