Why We Invested in Ceto

Today we have Tony Hildrew and Ben Harrison joining the Dynamo family as we announce the seed round of Ceto.

Ceto is a full-stack marine insurance platform that uses machine learning to leverage high-frequency telematics data from ships to offer three products: predictive maintenance, emissions tracking, and hull insurance products from its eponymous MGA. The company is focused on serving small to medium-sized ship owners with its hull insurance product.

Our conviction was the result of three key elements we observed when digging into Ceto:

1. Best of breed team led by Tony Hildrew. Tony has a novel combination of skills and experience that enables him to both understand the opportunity and address it. His background as a mechanical engineer and subsequently as a vessel manager provided the insight into what Ceto is today. Furthermore, he’s assembled a highly capable team including a CTO, Ben Harrison and CUO, Bob Clarkson
2. A MGA with distribution support from Howden. Ceto has been able to secure substantial MGA capacity early on it's development which is a testament to Tony, Ben, and Bob. This is a meaningful differentiator. Alongside this, Ceto’s partner Howden has a footprint across 50 countries, with a notable presence in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas, and the Middle East & Africa, employing 16,000 individuals globally to distribute insurance products. This provides Ceto a unique go-to-market strategy, which is similarly uncommon for a startup at such an early stage
3. Access to proprietary data. During its formation, a major global insurer provided Ceto with legacy claims data to allow Ceto to train its models, which has provided a substantial unfair advantage. This allowed Ceto to really understand what were the primary causes of claims for hull insurance and enabled them to develop predictive models to reduce the faults that have led to claims. Using this existing proprietary data set leapfrogs Ceto ahead of potential competition, while data streaming in from installed devices deepens this data moat over time

Time to go nerd out on the intersection of industry and insurance!