About Navasana
Navasana is the first intelligent cyber MGA, backed by Lloyd’s A+ paper. Cyber MGAs used to grow by hiring more underwriters. We grow by turning underwriting judgment into a system that learns. Our VIIRA platform empowers brokers, underwriters, and policyholders to manage cyber and AI risk at machine speed.
Tell us about your background.
Navasana was built by a team that has spent its career on both sides of cyber risk: underwriting it, and responding when it goes wrong. Between us we’ve built cyber books at Lloyd’s syndicates, global carriers, and venture-backed MGAs, scaled security platforms, and run breach response.
Manu Singh, CEO & Co-Founder. Manu has spent his career in cyber underwriting and product roles at carriers, MGAs, and specialty insurance companies. His expertise is at the intersection of cybersecurity and cyber insurance. For the last 14 years he’s helped CISOs, IT and security teams understand best practices to reduce the likelihood of cyber incidents.
Brian Hurd, COO & Co-Founder. Brian has a dozen years in cybersecurity, the last five in the cyber insurance ecosystem. He brings domain expertise in security, corporate strategy, and revenue growth.
Matthew Zeier, Co-Founder & AI Product Engineer. Matthew is a cybersecurity infrastructure veteran who built and scaled security platforms at VMware, Lacework, Darktrace, and Cowbell. He brings an operator’s lens to our platform: continuous risk assessment, not just day-one underwriting.
Brett Anderson, Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder. Brett co-founded Tracepoint, one of the fastest-growing DFIR practices, and led it through its acquisition by Booz Allen. Before that he led underwriting innovation and breach services at Beazley.
Several of us worked together at Beazley years ago. We’ve seen what works in cyber insurance, what doesn’t, and why the model must change.
Tell us about your business/idea.
Navasana is the first intelligent cyber MGA. We’re a Lloyd’s coverholder, which means our policies are written on Lloyd’s A+ paper.
Cyber MGAs have traditionally grown by hiring more underwriters. We grow by turning underwriting judgment into a system that learns. Our platform, VIIRA, runs the underwriting desk. It pulls together security posture integrations, internet-facing exposure data, and application data, applies our underwriting guidelines, and decides whether to quote, decline, or refer to a human underwriter. Every decision is recorded with the reasoning behind it, and our agentic systems learn from that logic.
We’re focused on US small and mid-sized businesses with two products: an open market cyber policy for SMBs, and an embedded cyber product for micro businesses. Both include affirmative AI coverage, so businesses deploying AI know exactly what is and isn’t covered.
What was the original inspiration for your company/product?
Cyber insurance has always been a one-way relationship. The insurer sends a questionnaire, prices the risk, and the insured mostly hears back at renewal. All the data the insurer gathers on a company’s exposure stays on the insurer’s side of the table.
We started Navasana to change that. We wanted to give organizations more than a risk transfer option. We share the telemetry we collect on their security posture and exposure with them, openly, so they can see exactly where they stand and what to fix. Every improvement makes them a better risk, and a better risk deserves a fairer premium.
Our goal is to turn the insurer and insured relationship into a partnership built on shared intelligence. When both sides see the same data, incentives line up: the policyholder gets safer, the premium reflects it, and we write a healthier book of business.
What’s your vision for the future? What will the market you are pursuing look like in 5–10 years?
Cyber and AI risk will be underwritten together. Today AI exposure is buried in silent cyber, tech E&O, and general liability wordings. Within a few years, AI will be affirmatively defined, priced, and covered, the same way cyber split out from other lines a decade ago.
Underwriting will be continuous. The annual application will give way to live data on a company’s security posture and AI use. Pricing and coverage will move with the risk, and policyholders will get feedback that actually helps them reduce it.
The winning insurance companies will be technology companies with insurance licenses. Capacity providers will favor programs whose decisions are explainable, auditable, and consistent. The MGAs that scale will do it by putting leverage on judgment, not by adding headcount. And the small business protection gap will close as embedded cyber becomes a default part of how small businesses buy insurance.
How does your business address pressing cyber and data challenges for the commercial sector?
Small and mid-sized businesses are where cyber risk is least managed and least insured. Most don’t have a security team, many don’t buy cyber coverage at all, and those that do often get a generic policy priced off a questionnaire.
Navasana addresses this in a few ways:
- Underwriting on real data. We assess a business’s actual security posture and external exposure, so pricing reflects the risk and good security gets rewarded.
- Affirmative AI coverage. Our three-tier framework (AI systems, generative AI systems, and agentic AI systems) is anchored to the global AI frameworks. Coverage addresses emerging threats like AI-related business interruption, AI system restoration, and third-party AI regulatory exposure.
- Reaching the businesses that are left out. Navasana Pulse embeds cyber protection into coverage micro businesses already buy, so they’re protected without a separate buying decision.
- Risk insight for brokers and policyholders. VIIRA helps brokers, underwriters, and policyholders manage cyber and AI risk at machine speed, not just transfer it.
What attracted you to the DataTribe Foundry? Why did you choose to participate in the DataTribe Challenge?
DataTribe has built a reputation for backing cyber companies with deep operator involvement, and the Challenge puts us in front of the people who shape this industry: founders, CISOs, investors, and practitioners.
We also think insurance is one of the most underused levers in cybersecurity. It’s how most businesses actually pay for and make decisions about cyber risk. We wanted to make that case to the cyber community directly and show that an MGA built this way is a technology company. The DataTribe Challenge pushes us to sharpen our story, pressure-test our model with experienced judges, and build relationships across the cyber ecosystem.
What’s your long-term vision for your business?
We want Navasana to become the intelligent underwriting layer for cyber and AI risk: the system the market trusts to tell it what that risk is worth and how to reduce it.
Near term, that means writing a profitable book on Lloyd’s capacity, scaling that capacity as the book performs, and proving that VIIRA lets a small team underwrite like a much larger one. From there, we’ll expand and broaden the product suite, and keep building the data advantage that comes from every decision the platform makes.
Long term, we want businesses to be able to buy cyber and AI protection as easily as any other coverage, priced on their actual risk, with an insurer that helps them get safer every year.
