Protos Labs: Building the Infrastructure for Cyber Insurance in Asia

We are excited to announce our investment in Protos Labs, a Singapore-based cyber insurtech sitting at the intersection of two powerful trends: the explosion of cyber threats across Asia and the near-total absence of insurance to cover them. We are proud to join Investible, Gobi Partners, BeeNext, VinaCapital, Plug and Play USA, and TIM Ventures (the corporate venture arm of FWD Insurance) in the company's seed round.

The most attacked region with the least insurance

Asia Pacific is the world's most targeted region for cybercrime. Ransomware, business email compromise, and critical infrastructure breaches are now daily headlines across Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Yet the region's cyber insurance market remains almost non-existent.

This is not because Asian companies do not need coverage. It is because insurers do not have the tools to accurately price the risk. APAC cyber insurance premiums represent a fraction of GDP compared to the US. Without real-time data on a company's systems and resilience, underwriters are flying blind. And most would rather not write the policy at all.

Protos Labs was built to solve exactly that problem.

Two people who spent a decade inside the problem

Joel Lee (CEO) and Simeon Tan (CTO) met while running the cybersecurity practice at Booz Allen Hamilton, the US-based consulting firm that works closely with intelligence agencies and critical infrastructure operators worldwide. Joel led Booz Allen's ASEAN cyber threat intelligence and risk management practice and advised national regulators on cyber policy. Simeon led the firm's ASEAN operational technology security practice, advising Global 500 companies and some of Asia's largest critical infrastructure operators on how to quantify and manage cyber exposure.

Before they started Protos Labs, Joel and Simeon had spent years sitting across the table from the same insurers and enterprises they now serve. They understood the underwriting problem at a technical level that most founders do not.

That background shapes everything about how Protos Labs approaches its product: threat-informed, data-driven, and built to answer the specific questions that a reinsurance underwriter needs resolved before issuing a policy.

The missing layer between cyber risk and insurance

Protos Labs operates as a B2B2B platform, sitting between insurers and their policyholders.

On one side, it gives underwriters a real-time view of a policyholder's cyber posture, including threat intelligence, system resilience scores, and ongoing monitoring. On the other side, it gives policyholders a continuous read of their own risk profile, with recommendations to reduce it.

The business model captures value in two ways. Protos Labs takes a share of every insurance policy it supports. It also charges a SaaS subscription to policyholders based on the number of systems being assessed. This creates a natural flywheel: more policyholders means more data, which improves pricing accuracy, which attracts more insurers. Instead of running periodic static audits, Protos Labs maps a company's live attack surface against actual threat actor behavior, continuously. This is the kind of intelligence that Hannover Re and Lloyd's of London need to price cyber policies in markets where historical claims data barely exists.

Chosen out of 150 applicants worldwide

Protos Labs was selected for Lloyd's Lab Cohort 11, the prestigious innovation accelerator run inside the Lloyd's of London building. They were one of a handful of companies chosen from over 150 applicants worldwide, and the first Singaporean company ever accepted.

For a young startup to earn that seat is not a PR win. It is validation from the oldest insurance market in the world that the product solves a real underwriting problem.

Customers today include the Cybersecurity Agency of Singapore (the national regulator), Hannover Re, Lloyd's of London, Pacific Insurance (a Fairfax Group company), HDB Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, and SP Group. These are not pilot customers. These are institutions with regulatory and financial accountability for the risks they are insuring or managing.

A market that barely exists yet

The total addressable market for cyber insurance in Asia Pacific is enormous and barely formed. The APAC cyber insurance market grew significantly in 2024, and is expanding rapidly as regional enterprises start to take coverage seriously. Protos Labs is positioned not as one participant in that market, but as the data infrastructure that makes the market possible.

The parallel is early fintech in Southeast Asia. When digital payments infrastructure arrived, it did not just improve payments. It unlocked an entirely new set of financial products that could not exist without it.

Cyber insurance in Asia is at that same inflection point. The risk is real. The demand is building. And the only thing missing has been the data layer to price it.

That is what Protos Labs is building.

Why we invested

The most defensible position in any insurance market is owning the data. Protos Labs is accumulating proprietary threat intelligence and cyber risk data across Asian enterprises in a way that will be very hard for any later entrant to replicate. The more policies it supports, the better its models get. The better its models get, the more insurers prefer it over alternatives.

This is a compounding advantage. And it starts from a base that has already earned the trust of Lloyd's of London, Hannover Re, and Singapore's national cybersecurity regulator.

We are also backing Joel and Simeon specifically. They spent a decade watching this problem from the inside, building credibility with exactly the institutions they now serve as customers. That positioning is rare, and it shows in how quickly they have assembled a customer list that most early-stage security companies would take years to build.

Asia's cyber risk is not going away. The insurance market to cover that risk is just beginning to form.

Protos Labs is the infrastructure layer that makes it work.

For more information about A2D Ventures, please visit our website.

For more information about Protos Labs, please visit their website.