5 Years of KYND: Celebrate good KYNDs come on

Today we're celebrating our fifth anniversary here at KYND. Yes, that's right – 18th March 2023 marks five whole years since our first launch and inception. Whilst five years may feel like no time at all (and it really has flown), anyone who is familiar with the cyber industry will be aware of just how much can happen in that time. We find that years in cyber are a bit like dog years; five years in the cyber industry equates to about thirty-five years in any other!

To mark this important moment in KYND's timeline, we're going to be looking back at a (brief) history of the company: the highlights and the challenges! We'll also consider the developments in the world of cyber risk, the key changes, and the next steps for KYND…

The infancy of KYND – our initial foray into the cyber world

Let's travel back to 2018. Team KYND began in a small office in Brixton with a team of only 3 people. We were a small business with a big heart, and a very important mission: to make complex cyber risks easy to see, understand and manage, for every business.

Back in 2018, cyber risks were becoming an increasingly prevalent business problem, affecting every business, big and small, across all industry sectors and in every market. And yet, for the majority of business owners, understanding these risks was considered incredibly complex and costly. A brief overview of the data in 2018 tells us that:

• Cyber was ranked 2nd most important business risk facing any organisation by the Allianz Global Risk Barometer. Almost 3 million British companies were hit by some sort of cyber-attack in the last 12 months, with costs totalling over £29 billion.

• Over 4 in 10 businesses (43%) had experienced cyber security breaches or attacks in the past 12 months.

• Three-quarters of all businesses (74%) said that cyber security was a very high priority for their organisation.

With a suite of powerful, yet very easy-to-use products initially aimed at SMBs, KYND endeavoured to stop the bad and to help business owners all over the UK avoid becoming victims of cybercrime.

So… what was next?

Fast forward to 2023, and we've rapidly grown in terms of the size of our team, the number of customers we've supported and worked with, the number of life-size cardboard cut-outs we own (yes, really), and the size (and amount) of our offices! We've expanded from a three-person start-up working out of a tiny and not-so-cosy office in Brixton to a team of forty people with offices in Central London, Porto and Austin TX. Additionally, we now have over 5000 customers using KYND products and serve over 30 different industries. How's that for growth?

How did we get here?

COVID-19

Over the past five years, there were, as you could expect, many highs, lows, challenges and highlights that we've experienced, overcome and achieved here at KYND. There is, of course, one global curveball that was experienced by businesses big and small throughout the UK and the rest of the world: COVID-19.

The global COVID-19 pandemic was an unpredicted challenge that KYND has had to contend with over the past five years. However, despite the disruption caused by a global phenomenon to a young start-up, we're proud of how KYND was not only able to weather the storm but to use it as an opportunity to experiment, adapt and learn new things along the way, in true KYND fashion!

As a business, we have always operated as a hybrid workforce, with our employees being set up for remote working long before the pandemic closed offices around the world. Our progressive approach meant that we were well adapted for the team to work fully remotely during the lockdown, and then again back to hybrid working once offices were able to safely re-open in 2021.

But how did the global pandemic impact the cyber industry? COVID forced a rapid and unplanned transition to online and remote working for almost all industries and businesses. For many organisations who were not initially set up to work in this way, this brought a whole swathe of risks and problems when it came to keeping their workforce safe online. Digital infrastructure became the focal point for a large majority of businesses. For this reason, many were on the back foot, needing to implement necessary processes and procedures to help manage their new or greatly increased cyber risks.

The uncertainty caused by these transitions left organisations vulnerable to cybercriminals. We saw a wave of ransomware attacks, mail spam and phishing attacks across the globe: ransomware accounted for 30% of all US-based cyber attacks in 2021, and malicious emails increased by a whopping 600% since the start of the pandemic.

Securing funding

A pandemic successfully navigated in the first five years of business operation? Tick. The next part of our journey at KYND consisted of securing important funding, accelerating our growth as a business. In January 2022 KYND secured Series A funding from BGF, the UK and Ireland's most active growth capital investor. With the backing of a partner with a proven track record of facilitating growth in ambitious scaleups, KYND was able to focus on enhancing product development and customer roll-out in the UK and beyond. The only way was up!

Adapting, growing and innovating for new markets

KYND's initial suite of products was created for SMBs looking for simple and effective ways to manage their cyber risks: but we weren't done there. Over the past five years, we have harnessed new opportunities and expanded into multiple markets such as Insurance, Managed Service Providers, Investment Management and Education, amongst many others. The insurance and broking market has been a key business area here at KYND and we have continued to innovate within this space, creating a new suite of products designed specifically to operate within this market.

KYND disrupts the insurance industry

As businesses have begun to recognise the considerable risks of cyber-attacks and breaches, the proportion of businesses opting to take out cyber coverage has increased significantly, from 26% in 2016 to 47% in 2020. However, the subsequent increase in the severity and frequency of claims and the higher losses being incurred have made insurers raise premiums to cover their costs – by more than 25% in the second quarter of 2021. Renewal rates, in turn, increased by more than 34% in the fourth quarter of 2021. As a result, many businesses were left unable to obtain or afford policies or have experienced premium increases that have left them unable to renew.

Enter KYND's Broker Programme. We have worked to develop an innovative suite of products and tools to help brokers successfully close more cyber insurance sales and more. By focusing on the problems within the insurance market and continuing to innovate within that space, we have successfully built a portfolio of impressive new and expanding relationships across the insurance industry over the past couple of years. Here's a snapshot of a few of our highlights:

• In August 2020, we welcomed specialist insurer BGI.UK as the first member of our newly-launched KYND Broker Programme specifically designed to simplify and accelerate cyber insurance sales.
  
  

• In April 2021, global (re)insurance broker Ed Broking joined our industry-recognised and rapidly expanding KYND Broker Programme.
  
  

• In March 2022, we extended our partnership with leading international insurance and reinsurance broker, Howden Broking, which we’ve been successfully working since 2020.
  
  

• In May 2022, we announced our partnership with global broking company BrokersLink, which gave BrokersLink’s members access to KYND's proprietary cyber risk technology and insight-led advisory services.
  
  

• In September 2022, we secured a partnership with Hylant, a leading privately owned U.S. insurance broker.

In addition to our expanding relationships across the insurance industry, we have also established partnerships within investment management and additional collaboration partnerships with tech partners. This includes working with Lombard Odier to offer improved cyber due diligence processes within the investment lifecycle and provide enhanced risk-based investment decisions, and partnering with Cytora to create an advanced cyber proposition for underwriters, brokers and clients, and more.

The highlights

Awards and accolades

It's not all about the awards, but 2022 was a particularly successful year for KYND in terms of being recognised and rewarded for excellence and innovation across different categories and sectors. Across the course of the year, we were recognised by:

• Fintech Global – we were listed as Global Top100 Cybertech company for the 3rd consecutive year, and as Global Top100 Insurtech company for the 2nd consecutive year. Additionally, it was our first time recognised as a Global Top100 ESG Fintech company (a brand-new category for innovative and trailblazing companies).
  

• CIR Awards – we were selected as the Cyber Security Product of the Year.
  

• Wealth and Finance Award – the cherry on the cake! KYND was announced as the winner of the "Most Innovative Cyber Risk Management Solutions Provider of 2022" at the Fintech Awards.

The very best bits

Whilst awards and recognition are always rewarding to receive, our very best bits have to be about the people that make KYND so great. We're incredibly proud of the partnerships we've built, the products we've created and the awards we've achieved over the past five years. None of this would have been possible without the continued expansion of our fantastic team of incredibly talented individuals.

A key highlight for us last year was making the move from Brixton to our wonderful and cosy new office in London Bridge, which has allowed us to continue to expand our team over the past twelve months. We've attracted a bunch of incredibly bright talents across all our departments (including a lifesize cardboard cutout of David Hasselhoff who's joined our Sales Team). As of January 2023, we have further strengthened our leadership team by appointing the brilliant Darryn Edgar as Non-executive Director, and Dave Moreau as Non-executive Chairman. Moreau brings to the Board more than 30 years of international executive-level experience in the media services and technology arenas, with a particular focus on strategic partnership development, operational excellence, corporate governance, and leadership mentoring and we're incredibly excited to have him on board.

We're not done yet!

Cyber risk is currently ranked as the number one most important business risk facing any organisation. Considering that cyber incidents are now estimated to cost the world economy no less than $1trn a year, it is of no surprise that cyber risk came out top of customer concerns in this year's Allianz Risk Barometer. What's more, with larger corporations now investing heavily in cyber risk management, small and mid-sized businesses are now being targeted more frequently as they often don't have the necessary controls in place to successfully mitigate cyber risks. The need for KYND is greater than ever.

So, what's next for team KYND?

This year, we are planning our expansion into the United States following our success in recent years partnering with global specialist insurers across the UK and Europe, including Beazley and Howden. We are looking to grow our presence in the US to better serve our existing and new clients there.

More generally, we're incredibly excited about the product pipeline and enhancements to the KYND suite – but we're not ready to spill the beans just yet! Since KYND's inception, we have always prioritised listening to our customers to better understand what exactly they need and we strive to always deliver the highest quality of service, to each and every one of them. For this reason, we are now waiting to reveal exciting product developments that our new and current clients will benefit from in their fight against complex cyber risks.

Overall, we will continue to grow KYND as the industry leader, innovator and disruptor in the field of cyber risk management. Our goal is to help as many businesses as possible manage their cyber risk in a way that is both effective and easy to understand. And, as always: we're on a mission to stop the bad!