Investment in Cygnvs | Andreessen Horowitz
Cyber incidents have reached a crisis level in the last decade. In 2021, the United States saw 1,862 data compromises, affecting almost 300 million people (a nearly 100% increase from five years ago). Cybersecurity practitioners are no longer fooling around if they will handle a breach but when and how the breach they are dealing with will be severe. Although the cyber insurance market has grown rapidly to secure this growing risk, companies remain underprepared to respond to the inevitable.
Most companies prepare and plan for a breach. However, this plan is often archived in a system that breaks with the rest of the company’s core systems, rendering it useless. When an incident occurs, the key personnel in the company to help solve problems needed to collaborate both with each other and with critical external stakeholders such as incident response companies, insurance companies, law firms and consultants.
Enter Cygnvs, the Crisis Operating System (Crisis OS) that serves as the system of record for pre-incident preparation and post-incident response and as a communication platform in times of crisis. Its proprietary software exists in an environment separate from the systems a company uses for day-to-day operations, creating a secure platform where key personnel can communicate internally and coordinate with external parties during a breach.
Cygnvs already works with many of the world’s largest cyber insurance companies and brokers who offer the Cygnvs platform to their policyholders. When policyholders sign up and leverage the existing pre-incident and incident response templates, their learning and best practices can be shared across the entire Cygnvs system, leading to more value being created for everyone. Many companies choose to buy Cygnvs directly to customize their own playbooks and to bring their own panel of vendors.
A company like Cygnvs can only be built by an entrepreneur with a deep understanding of the market. Before founding Cygnvs, Arvind Parthasarathi founded Cyence, a pioneer in cyber insurance that sold to Guidewire. That experience gave Arvind a unique understanding of the pain of his customers and a clear vision for finding a solution. Prior to founding Cyence, Arvind spent nearly 20 years around computing and data security as GM and CEO of YarcData (which was a division of Cray Software that was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2020). He was also product manager at Oracle, Informatica and i2 Technologies.
We are delighted to be working with Arvind and Cygnvs as they build the category-defining crisis operating system.
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