Company Overview
Brian Waltermire is the CEO & Founder of DLT Alert, a company that creates parametric cyber warranties to improve coverages for small and medium businesses in areas that are hard to price and manage losses, like ransomware. Learn more at https://www.dltalert.com/.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
My professional experience started on Wall Street just around the time of the dot-com bust in 2000, when I worked at a hedge fund. I worked in hedge funds for about seven or eight years as a trader. I then transitioned into investment banking, where I worked as a banker.
Through investment banking, I found an opportunity, raised some money on my own, acquired a company, and started running it. At the same time, I co-founded the first online dry cleaner in New York City with my brother, and that was pretty cool. It was a great journey that lasted for about 10 years.
The company that I acquired was what’s called a managed service provider. Basically, we provided remote IT services, whether that was cloud hosting—think AWS—or cybersecurity services managed for small businesses. If your company doesn’t have enough money to hire in-house IT or cybersecurity staff, you outsource that. We would install software, manage it, and handle things like remediating issues.
I ran that business for 10 years, and I still have it today. During that time, particularly over the past three years, I started seeing a lot of issues with some of our clients. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, I realized there were real problems when our customers experienced cyber breaches and had to deal with their insurance to get paid.
It raised a lot of questions: Why is this process so difficult? Why does it look like a giant waste of money for insurers? And why does it hurt customers so much because of the time it takes to work through claims? There’s often a lack of clear information, and payments are delayed. Insurance isn’t really incentivized to pay quickly, and in cyber insurance, that was especially clear to us.
So we set out to build a DLT to help alleviate some of those problems for our customers and for ourselves. Now we’re enabling other organizations to leverage our technology to solve the same problem.
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?
We really started with the need. There was no plan to build this. We were just in the firing line of CEOs and their boards after they had been hit by criminal cyberattacks.
We were sitting in these board meetings and C-suite meetings, basically having to explain what was happening and relate that information to lawyers, CEOs, IT teams, and notably insurance professionals. We ended up acting as a kind of translator—like a Rosetta Stone—so insurance people could talk to the IT teams, while the CEO was confused and angry and trying to understand what was going on.
All of this was happening at once, and we were in the middle helping to explain and translate everything. That’s when we said, there has to be a better way to do this. That’s really how we identified the need. We weren’t originally looking to solve this problem—the problem kept presenting itself to us. Our customers were suffering, and we also knew it was a big cost center for insurers.
So we started thinking: if we could create a solution that helps translate cybersecurity information into something the insurance industry can understand, what would that look like? That was the initial concept.
The way it began was through my role as a corporate architect. I tend to look at things from the big-picture perspective. I don’t do coding or a lot of the detailed technical work, but I can see the overall structure. I conceptualize how things should work and then find the people who can help build it.
I first explained the idea to one of our salespeople at the IT company, and he really liked it. After that, I started mapping everything out—the flows, the systems, and how it would work. One of the key ideas was using blockchain to validate certain elements so there would be a higher level of trust in the system, rather than relying on a subjective ruling from an insurance claims person.
The goal was to improve multiple pain points within the larger issue, which was the lack of communication between these different groups. I essentially architected the concept and then began finding the people and technologies needed to bring it to life.
About three years ago, my first step was finding people with blockchain experience, because I believed blockchain would be a critical component. It actually turned out to be a smaller component than expected, but it was still important. It took some time to find the right team, but through friends and connections, I eventually did.
So it really started with identifying a recurring problem and realizing there might be an opportunity to help our clients. At first, we thought it would just be a tool for the IT company to support our customers. But over time, we realized the opportunity for the DLT platform was actually much bigger than the IT company itself.
From there, we started building the right team—beginning mostly with outsourced developers to start bringing the architecture to life.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
I mentioned blockchain earlier, and we’re using blockchain for two main purposes. First, we’re using it to externally validate a cyber incident. The goal is to increase trust in the process while also speeding things up. Essentially, we wanted to remove as much human subjectivity as possible from the insurance equation, which is how most insurance operates today.
For example, in traditional insurance, you might damage the hood of your car in an accident, and then there’s negotiation. Someone might say, “It’s partially your fault,” or “It’s partially their fault,” and the insurer might offer to cover only a portion of the cost. There’s a lot of subjective judgment involved.
We wanted to approach this differently by replacing subjectivity with objectivity wherever possible. We do that by taking cyber incident data—like a cyberattack represented by a hash or SHA—and recording it on a blockchain system called Chainlink. Then we connect that with open-source malware and cybersecurity attack data to automatically validate incidents.
You can think of it a bit like how doctors identify different strains of a virus. For example, with COVID-19, there were multiple variants, and a doctor could determine which strain you had based on available data. Computer viruses work in a similar way. Around the world, cybersecurity researchers constantly upload information about new malware or variations of existing threats. Our system looks at that global dataset to validate incidents automatically, rather than relying solely on a human claims adjuster.
That’s one major differentiator.
The other is our use of what’s called parametric insurance. Parametric insurance is a binary model—essentially an “if this, then that” structure. Traditional insurance is coverage-based: it lists what might be covered and then uses subjective evaluation to determine how much will be paid, or whether something qualifies.
In our model, it’s much simpler. If you are attacked and the incident is validated, you get paid 100%. That’s it.
By limiting the parameters, the process can be automated. Instead of someone debating circumstances—like whether conditions contributed to the incident or who might be responsible—we focus on a few clear criteria:
- Were the payment terms met?
- Were the systems connected to our platform?
- Did we validate an attack?
If the answer to those questions is yes, the payout happens automatically.
When you structure coverage this way, the benefits for customers are significant. It’s not necessarily meant to replace traditional insurance, but it offers a different model with clear advantages—especially in terms of speed, transparency, and predictability.
So I would say two of our biggest differentiators are the structure of the coverage itself and the blockchain-based incident validation. From everything I’ve seen, that validation approach is quite novel globally.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
Yeah, it’s interesting because we initially went the traditional route. We joined an accelerator program and connected with a major insurance executive there who came on as an investor and advisor. He’s a great guy, a friend, and he’s been very helpful. Through him, we started plugging into traditional insurance distribution systems, which, on the surface, makes a lot of sense.
Early on, we even closed a deal with the largest distributor in this insurance group shortly after launching. They paid us, and we were excited—we thought, “We’re going to the moon.” Everything seemed to be lining up.
But we soon started seeing breakdowns in the traditional insurance sales process. Our product—a parametric cyber warranty—wasn’t poorly designed or difficult to understand, but it didn’t fit neatly into the existing system. Insurance brokers are used to selling traditional policies, and when you introduce a new type of product, it disrupts their workflow. They’re busy and focused on making sales. To use an analogy: they’re used to selling apples, and suddenly you show up with a pomegranate. They might say, “That’s interesting, I see the value and I can make money from it,” but ultimately they’re still focused on selling apples.
So while we did generate some revenue from that early deal, the sales throughput just wasn’t there. That forced us to go back to the drawing board. The original approach is still viable—it just needs some adjustments because we’re working within a somewhat antiquated system. No offense to anyone; that’s simply the reality. The system works well for traditional products, but introducing new models into it can be difficult.
The new approach we’ve taken—and where we’re seeing strong traction—is partnering directly with cybersecurity companies. Instead of selling this product as insurance through brokers, we sell the financial coverage directly to cybersecurity providers, and they offer it to their customers.
This approach creates two major benefits for them.
First, it gives their customers a higher level of confidence in the cybersecurity service they’re buying. Essentially, if the service fails, the customer has a financial warranty that pays out immediately.
Second—and this is where we see significant value—it’s not just a paper contract like traditional insurance. When you buy car or home insurance, you receive a large stack of documents that usually ends up in a drawer somewhere. With our platform, we integrate directly with cybersecurity services through APIs. That allows us to create dynamic financial coverage that responds to signals from the cybersecurity provider’s system.
For example, a company like CrowdStrike focuses heavily on protecting businesses from ransomware and has specific capabilities that differentiate its platform. Customers ultimately just want to be protected, but CrowdStrike also wants to highlight why its technology is better.
With our system, we can structure financial coverage around those differentiating features. If the cybersecurity provider rates customers based on how well they’re using the platform, we can tie coverage levels directly to those ratings. For instance, customers who receive an “A” rating for properly implementing the system might receive $1 million in coverage. Customers with a “B” rating—because they aren’t using the system as effectively—might receive $500,000. And those coverage levels can change dynamically based on real-time usage data from the cybersecurity platform.
That dynamic connection between cybersecurity performance and financial coverage becomes a powerful value proposition for these companies. Internally, we refer to them as OEM partners—cybersecurity solution providers who integrate our coverage into their offering.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company
Yeah, absolutely. Recently, we secured a significant amount of reinsurance capacity through some partners. As of this year, we now have tens of millions of dollars backing our policies. That allows us to increase our coverage limits and start offering million-dollar policies and similar levels of protection.
The bigger goal is to generate enough value for our cybersecurity vendors and insurance partners that we eventually become an acquisition target—most likely for an insurance company. Ideally, they would look at the platform and say, “This technology makes the entire process better.” At that point, our vision would be fulfilled: we identified a real problem, set out to solve it, brought the right pieces together, proved the model, and ultimately created value that leads to an acquisition and strong shareholder returns.
Of course, there are many steps along the way to getting there. Building a company involves a lot of personal growth—going through ups and downs, building a team, improving communication, and navigating everything that comes with scaling a small business.
The path forward is relatively straightforward in concept. We need to continue acquiring customers, improving the reliability and validation of our technology, and demonstrating the value of the solution. The value proposition is already there; in many cases, stakeholders simply want to see stronger metrics or a longer track record before fully committing.
