Investing in Cygnvs

Cyber incidents have reached a crisis level over the past decade. In 2021, the U.S. saw 1,862 data compromises, affecting nearly 300 million people (a nearly 100% increase from five years ago). Cybersecurity practitioners no longer wonder if they will deal with a breach, but when and how severe the breach they deal with will be. Even though the cyber insurance market has grown rapidly to insure this increasing risk, companies remain underprepared to respond to the inevitable.

Most companies prepare and plan for a breach. However, that plan is often filed away inside a system that is breached alongside the rest of the company’s core systems, rendering it useless. Once an incident happens, the key company personnel needed to help resolve it struggles to collaborate both with each other and with critical external stakeholders like incident response firms, insurers, law firms, and consultants. 

Enter Cygnvs, the Crisis Operating System (Crisis OS) that acts as the system of record for pre-incident preparation and post-incident response and as a communications platform in times of crisis. Its proprietary software exists in an environment separate from the systems a company uses for daily operations, creating a secure platform where key response personnel can communicate internally and coordinate with external parties during a breach. 

Cygnvs already works with many of the world’s largest cyber insurance carriers and brokers who offer the Cygnvs platform to their policyholders. As policyholders sign up and leverage the existing pre-incident templates and respond to incidents, their learnings and best practices can be shared across the entire Cygnvs system, leading to more value being created for all. Many companies choose to buy Cygnvs directly in order 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 underwriting that sold to Guidewire. That experience gave Arvind a unique appreciation for the pain of his customers and a clear vision for finding a solution. Prior to founding Cyence, Arvind spent nearly 20 years around data and data security as the GM and CEO of YarcData (which was a division of Cray software that was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2020). He was also a product leader at Oracle, Informatica, and i2 Technologies.

We are thrilled to be partnering with Arvind and Cygnvs as they build the category-defining Crisis Operating System.

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• Source: https://a16z.com/2023/01/24/investing-in-cygnvs/