Cork Protection Celebrates Three Years of Redefining Cyber and Financial Resilience for SMBs

Cork Protection is marking its third anniversary with a milestone few startups in cybersecurity can claim: building an entirely new category where operational visibility and financial protection converge. In just three years, the company has gone from an ambitious newcomer to a foundational name in the Managed Service Provider (MSP) ecosystem—protecting over eight million endpoints and thousands of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) from digital and financial collapse.

The New Economics of Cyber Protection

Cork’s rise reflects a seismic shift in how SMBs approach cybersecurity. Traditionally, MSPs operated as the unsung guardians of small business infrastructure—managing antivirus tools, patches, and backups while hoping the insurance coverage behind them would hold. But as threat actors grow more sophisticated and insurance underwriters grow more skeptical, visibility into actual risk has become a survival metric.

“Cork was built to protect the heartbeat of the economy – small businesses,” said Dan Candee, CEO of Cork. “For too long, SMBs were left behind in cybersecurity and risk financing. We’ve proven that operational visibility and financial protection can exist together, and when they do, businesses survive events that used to end them.”

Bridging the Gap Between Security and Survival

Since its founding in 2022, Cork has integrated with more than 100 leading MSP tools—spanning remote monitoring, endpoint detection, data recovery, and SaaS backup—creating one of the most agnostic views of risk across the industry. This neutral visibility allows MSPs to identify vulnerabilities, validate compliance, and link those insights directly to warranty-backed protection.

The model is paying off. Over the past year alone, Cork safeguarded more than 38,000 businesses through nearly 4 million live risk validation events, and its real-world financial payouts have helped keep clients operational during incidents. Its loss ratio—below 0.001 percent—rivals the top-performing firms in cyber insurance.

“Having spent my career building for MSPs, I know what keeps them up at night,” said Austin McChord, Managing Director at Outsiders Fund and Co-Founder of Slide. “We created Cork to solve a critical challenge: the gap between cybersecurity and financial liability. In just three years, we've delivered a mission-critical platform that doesn't just add a layer of protection; it gives MSPs and their SMB clients true, measurable peace of mind.”

Adapting to the “Great Pivot”

Cork’s recent SMB Cyber Defense 2026 report warns that AI-driven, asymmetric attacks are rendering traditional MSP models obsolete. As attackers automate at scale, MSPs must “pivot” toward a security-first posture where cyber posture and financial assurance are interlinked—a direction Cork is uniquely positioned to lead.

It’s a philosophy that goes beyond stopping attacks. It’s about ensuring businesses can withstand them, recover, and thrive. For many MSPs, Cork’s approach represents the missing financial bridge that finally aligns cybersecurity outcomes with economic resilience.

What’s Next for Cork

As the company looks toward its next growth phase, Cork is expanding its integrations, deepening insurance partnerships, and scaling its reach beyond North America. The mission remains consistent: give every business, regardless of size, the clarity to see risk, the control to act on it, and the confidence to recover from it.

Three years in, Cork isn’t just redefining what “security-first” means—it’s proving that cyber resilience and financial resilience are no longer separate conversations.