Company Overview
Basil Mimi is Co-Founder at Mantas, a company that protects businesses against cyber risk. We provide tailored cyber insurance and predictive analytics that help businesses mitigate cloud downtime risks. Our parametric solutions ensure uninterrupted operations for cloud-dependent businesses, including e-commerce platforms, SaaS providers, and digital enterprises. Learn more at https://mantas.ai/.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
I’m a software engineer with a background in software development and artificial intelligence solutions. I’ve worked for about a decade, primarily in software and AI companies, across various sectors including fintech and media.
In my most recent role, I worked at a Chinese AI company where I designed AI solutions for major theme parks such as Warner Bros., SeaWorld, and Ferrari World. That was my focus in my last position.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
About a year ago, one of our staff members was trying to order food through a delivery app, and the app crashed because their cloud was down. It stayed down for hours, and they lost a lot of money. I thought — if something like that happened to us as a software company, we’d lose a lot too.
So I started researching ways businesses could protect or compensate themselves in these situations. I couldn’t find much at first, but then I came across parametric insurance, which uses technology to monitor risks and trigger automatic payouts when certain conditions are met.
I built a model around this idea and sent out a survey to a number of CTOs and CISOs, asking questions like: “Would you buy this kind of coverage? How much coverage would you need? What does your cloud infrastructure look like?” The response showed there was a real demand for it. That’s where the idea was born.
From there, I took a course in insurance, got educated on the industry, built a team, and started developing our own monitoring solutions. The next steps were securing capacity from reinsurance partners and applying for a license. Last month, we received in-principle approval for our license, which allows us to operate as a regulated MGA, handling insurance intermediation and management.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
We built Mantas to help businesses recoup some of the money they lose and facilitate fast recovery. The way we do it is through providing parametric insurance policies for the cloud outreaches to cover the business interruptions caused by the data centers of the likes of Amazon Cloud, Google Cloud and Microsoft to cloud, these parametric policies, has predefined limits structures and so on, and we it is built that way. It’s transparent, fair and data driven. We also provide predictive analytics for the policy holders, where we give the businesses heads up before an issue would happen that way. It doesn’t impact their operations. So we’re leveraging the data we’re collecting from the data centers and the policyholders to feed it into our AI engine, where we give them these smart alerts.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
The goal is basically to bridge the gap that we have today in the traditional cyber insurance policies. We are here to help the businesses and the insurance carriers navigate through these digital risks. We’re starting off with Cloud outages, and you will try to cover other business interruption and evolving risks, especially today, with AI and what’s going on in the cyberspace.
