Munich Re will buy At-Bay for $575M, Reuters reports

Why it matters

Reuters reported that Munich Re will acquire At-Bay, but Munich Re's official deal disclosures still show only an investment relationship. The mismatch matters for founders and investors assessing the reported $575 million price against At-Bay's last disclosed $1.35 billion financing valuation.

Reuters reported on August 19 that Munich Re will acquire At-Bay, the cyber insurer founded by Rotem Iram and Roman Itskovich, at a $575 million enterprise value. The report said the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027.

Munich Re's 2025 annual report listed a 3.68% holding in At-Bay at the end of 2025. Reuters attributed the acquisition terms to Munich Re, while the annual report still described the relationship as an investment.

If completed on the terms Reuters described, the transaction would turn an early strategic backer into At-Bay's owner. Munich Re Ventures led At-Bay's $34 million Series B through its HSB fund in 2020. At-Bay said Munich Re also provided underwriting capacity.

An insurer built by security and finance operators

Iram and Itskovich founded At-Bay in 2016 around a simple diagnosis: small businesses were becoming dependent on software faster than they could build security teams, leaving insurers to price a technical risk they could barely observe.

Iram came to the problem from both sides. Before At-Bay, he helped build the cyber-risk practice at K2 Intelligence, worked at McKinsey and served as a captain in Israel's Unit 8200. He studied computer engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Itskovich brought a finance and product background. He worked in financial products at Ebury, invested at Bain Capital and consulted at McKinsey before co-founding At-Bay. He also earned an MBA from Harvard.

Their answer was to put insurance and security monitoring inside one organization. At-Bay scans policyholders' external attack surfaces, flags vulnerabilities and uses the resulting information in underwriting and risk management. At-Bay later expanded into incident response, managed detection and response, technology errors and omissions coverage and professional-liability insurance.

Iram framed the founding problem bluntly during At-Bay's 2020 Series B announcement: "The deck is stacked against small business owners." At-Bay's pitch was that an insurer shares the financial incentive to prevent an attack, giving it a reason to monitor risk between the day a policy is written and the day a claim arrives.

That model has since spread across cyber insurance. Established carriers and technology-focused underwriters increasingly combine coverage with vulnerability scanning, automated underwriting and security services. Travelers completed its acquisition of Corvus Insurance in January 2024, citing Corvus's technology for identifying vulnerabilities throughout the policy period.

A completed acquisition of At-Bay would extend that consolidation pattern. Cyber insurers need underwriting capacity and balance-sheet strength. Large carriers have shown an appetite for the software, claims data and security operations developed by newer entrants.

The reported price needs careful reading

The $575 million enterprise value reported by Reuters would sit well below the $1.35 billion post-money valuation At-Bay announced after its $185 million Series D in July 2021. Icon Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners co-led that round, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Microsoft's M12, Acrew Capital, Qumra Capital, Glilot Capital, entrepreneur Shlomo Kramer and Munich Re Ventures' HSB fund.

These figures measure different things. The 2021 number was a post-money equity valuation set in a venture financing. Reuters described the reported acquisition figure as enterprise value, which accounts for capital structure and cannot establish what shareholders would receive without details covering cash, debt and other adjustments.

The 2021 valuation remains At-Bay's last officially disclosed financing valuation. At the time, the company said it had reached $160 million in annual recurring premium and was growing premium 800% year over year. At-Bay later added a $20 million Series D extension and said it had raised $292 million in total.

The reported $575 million enterprise value cannot support conclusions about investor returns or the consideration shareholders would receive without a detailed acquisition announcement covering the transaction structure.

Munich Re already backed the feedback loop

At-Bay's strategic asset is the feedback loop between attacks and insurance pricing. Each incident can give an insurer evidence about which vulnerabilities, software configurations and security controls are associated with financial loss. That evidence can influence underwriting decisions and the advice given to customers.

Iram has spent years arguing that insurance can use those incentives to improve security for smaller organizations. The approach also creates a data advantage that becomes harder to reproduce as the policy portfolio and claims history grow.

Munich Re had already helped finance that thesis and provide capacity behind it. Its HSB fund joined At-Bay's financing in 2020, and the reinsurer still reported a 3.68% holding at the end of 2025. Any move from investor to owner would materially deepen that relationship, but the annual report supplied for this review documented only the earlier holding, not the acquisition terms.