Here's a number that keeps showing up in pitch decks, database entries, and breathless startup roundups: At-Bay, the cyber insurance darling, raised $70 million in its Series C.
It didn't.
The San Francisco-based company—which bills itself as the world's first "InsurSec" provider, blending underwriting with active threat monitoring—actually closed a $34 million Series C back in December 2020. Qumra Capital led the round. M12, Microsoft's venture arm, participated. The confusion, it seems, stems from a peculiar case of corporate identity theft by proximity: two entirely different cybersecurity firms, SAFE Security and Torq, each announced $70 million Series C rounds in 2024. Neither has anything to do with At-Bay, yet the figure stuck.
Why does this matter? In an industry where credibility hinges on capital depth and actuarial precision, getting the basics wrong creates noise. And for At-Bay—a company that's raised $292 million across five rounds since 2016 and hit unicorn status in 2021—the phantom $70 million undersells what actually happened.
Follow the Money
At-Bay's funding story begins in May 2018 with a $13 million Series A. Khosla Ventures, where Keith Rabois was already making noise in fintech, co-led alongside Lightspeed Venture Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer, a veteran of Check Point Software fame. CEO Rotem Iram and co-founder Roman Itskovich used the capital to build out proactive cyber monitoring tools and launch insurance products targeting small and mid-sized businesses—the segment often left behind by traditional carriers still clinging to legacy underwriting models.
The Series B landed in February 2020, just as the pandemic began reshaping every assumption about digital risk. Acrew Capital and Munich Re Ventures' HSB fund put in $34 million; existing backers doubled down. At-Bay said revenue had grown tenfold and its broker network had swelled 400 percent in 2019. That kind of expansion, particularly in a sector as relationship-driven as commercial insurance, suggested something was working.
Nine months later, on December 8, 2020, came the Series C. $34 million. Qumra Capital led, M12 joined, and the usual suspects—Acrew, Khosla, Lightspeed, Munich Re Ventures, Kramer—came back for more. By then, At-Bay disclosed it had raised $74 million over the course of 2020 and logged 600 percent year-over-year topline growth. Not bad for a company navigating a global economic freeze.
The real inflection point arrived July 27, 2021. At-Bay closed a $185 million Series D co-led by Icon Ventures and Lightspeed, hitting a $1.35 billion post-money valuation. The company had surpassed $160 million in annual recurring premium and was claiming ransomware claims frequency seven times lower than the industry average—a metric that, if accurate, would make any CFO sit up. Three months later, ION Crossover Partners tossed in another $20 million as an extension, bringing the cumulative haul to $292 million as of October 2021.
That's the last disclosed equity raise. No $70 million anywhere in the timeline.
How Misinformation Spreads
The phantom figure likely emerged from the usual suspects: lazy database scraping, reporters working off outdated notes, or the simple fact that cybersecurity funding news tends to blur together. SAFE Security, a Palo Alto-based risk quantification platform, raised $70 million in a Series C in July 2024. Torq, an Israeli security automation firm, announced a $70 million C two months later. Both operate in adjacent spaces. Neither are At-Bay. Yet somehow the numbers migrated, probably because someone copied a line from a press release without checking the dateline.
It's a minor error in isolation, perhaps. But in venture capital, where pattern recognition drives decision-making, these small inaccuracies compound. Founders benchmark against competitors. Limited partners assess fund performance. Journalists build narratives. When the data is wrong, everything downstream gets skewed.
What At-Bay Actually Does
The company's pitch rests on a term it coined: InsurSec, a marriage of insurance underwriting and active security operations. At-Bay underwrites cyber liability and tech errors-and-omissions policies while simultaneously operating At-Bay Stance, a unified security platform offering managed detection and response. More than 40,000 policyholders use the service, which monitors 1.5 million assets and claims a mean time to remediate threats of 15 minutes. Whether that speed holds up under stress is harder to verify from the outside, but the model itself represents a departure from traditional insurance's arms-length relationship with risk mitigation.
In January 2023, At-Bay took a significant step: it acquired At-Bay Specialty Insurance Company, a Delaware surplus lines carrier, and began issuing policies on its own paper by August 2023. AM Best, the insurance industry's credit rating arbiter, assigned an A- (Excellent) financial strength rating in 2023 and reaffirmed it in 2025. The company reported $301 million in gross insurance premiums and more than $110 million in annual net revenue in 2023, according to CTech.
Recent product launches include email-focused fraud defense tools rolled out in February 2025, and expanded coverage for businesses up to $5 billion in revenue with limits reaching $10 million, introduced in June 2024. At-Bay's 2025 InsurSec report found that 80 percent of ransomware attacks traced back to compromised remote access tools—VPN and RDP vulnerabilities—and noted that only 31 percent of ransoms were paid, with $146 million in ransoms unpaid by customers and $49 million in stolen funds clawed back. Those numbers suggest either better defenses or more companies willing to call the bluff, though causality is always tricky in breach data.
The Bigger Picture
At-Bay operates in a market projected to nearly double from roughly $16.5 billion in 2025 to $32.2 billion by 2030, per GlobeNewswire forecasts. That growth trajectory has caught the attention of legacy insurers. Travelers' $435 million acquisition of Corvus Insurance in January 2024 signaled that incumbents are no longer content to cede the tech-enabled cyber underwriting space to upstarts. It also raises a question: does At-Bay's independent carrier model give it enough of a moat, or will scale eventually force consolidation?
The company added Ken Riegler, a former AIG executive, as president of At-Bay Insurance in August 2024, a hire that suggests continued buildout of its carrier operations. Whether that evolution will require more capital—or whether premium growth alone can fund expansion—remains unclear. At-Bay hasn't announced a new equity round since October 2021, though that doesn't mean talks aren't happening behind closed doors. Valuations have cooled since the 2021 highs, and late-stage startups are sitting longer between rounds.
For now, the record stands: $292 million raised, no $70 million Series C in sight. It's a small correction in the grand scheme of venture capital bookkeeping. But in an industry built on asymmetric information, getting the details right matters more than ever.
