$3M seed round for Bloomington startup

Bloomington-based startup SecondSight has secured a more than $3 million seed round of funding to advance the company’s AI platform to help businesses who get hit by ransomware attacks.

The company says the system helps businesses to better understand their digital assets and assess their risk and value when they file a claim with their insurance carrier.

“Digital risk is only meaningful and actionable for business stakeholders when it’s connected to the bottom line,” said Reuben Vandeventer, CEO and founder of SecondSight.

Vandeventer says the platform takes an ‘inside-out’ approach for underwriting and gives businesses a clearer picture of the assets. They say the technology allows cyber insurance providers to be able to quantify risk severity and calculate loss.

“SecondSight recognizes that cybersecurity and true digital risk are really about assets and liabilities,” said Vandeventer, adding there’s an increased need to accurately measure the true digital risk and severity that lives within an organization.

The company says ransomware attacks surpass $7.5 billion annually and businesses are constantly vulnerable to unseen threats. The company says as the digital risk grows, so does complexity, making it harder to obtain cyber insurance to hedge against those risks.

SecondSight says a majority of businesses in North America either uninsured or underinsured against skyrocketing growth of ransomware attacks and other cyber threats.

The company says the financing was led by Tim Crown, co-founder of Insight Enterprises (Nasdaq: NSIT), an Arizona-based global technology company. Other investors include Indiana Ventures, Cook Ventures, and Flywheel Fund.

The company currently has 20 employees and is looking to double employee levels over the next year hs for product management, UX design, engineering, and data science.