Cork Marks Three Years Linking MSPs to SMB Cyber Resilience

Cork Protection is celebrating its third anniversary this month, marking three years of growth and innovation in how MSPs support and protect SMB clients across North America.

Founded in 2022 with a mission to make financial protection accessible to every business, the company now supports more than eight million endpoints, protects thousands of small businesses, and integrates with over 100 MSP tools, including RMMs, EDRs, BCDR, and email security platforms.

Combining cyber visibility with financial protection

At the heart of Cork’s approach is a platform that combines actionable cybersecurity insights with warranty-backed financial protection. This model gives MSPs and their clients real-time visibility into vulnerabilities and connects that insight directly to coverage designed to keep businesses operational after an incident.

Over the past year, Cork has demonstrated the impact of its approach. The company reports protecting more than 38,800 businesses from 3.9 million compliance and risk-validation events while delivering real-world financial protection payouts that helped clients stay afloat during cyber incidents. The company also achieved a loss ratio of less than 0.001 percent, which is one of the lowest in the industry.

“The data point I’m proudest of is the cash we’ve paid out in warranty claims for incidents like ransomware, ACH fraud, and business email compromise,” CEO Dan Candee told Channel Insider. “It’s one thing to sell a promise; it’s another to deliver on it when your partners and their clients need it most. Zero claims denied. We’ve seen firsthand that a cyber incident doesn’t have to be an extinction-level event. That proves our model and is our true differentiator.”

MSPs are increasingly looking to combine cyber visibility with financial risk mitigation, a trend that continues to shape how they protect clients and strengthen revenue streams.

Cork continues to evangelize shift in MSP security approach

“Having spent my career building for MSPs, I know what keeps them up at night,” said Austin McChord, the managing director of the Outsiders Fund, CEO of Casana and co-founder and chairman 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.”

The Outsiders Fund is one of several investors in Cork, with additional backing from DVx Ventures, Vestigo Ventures and Top Down Ventures.

By enabling MSPs to validate cyber posture in real time, Cork helps them move from a reactive security model to a proactive one connecting cyber defense to business resilience. For MSPs, this aligns with broader industry moves toward security-first frameworks like CIS Controls.

“We’ve seen the average incident we cover cost an SMB around $80,000. By leveraging Cork, our MSP partners can go to their clients and say, ‘We’ve built you the best defense… and if the worst still happens, we have a mechanism in place to provide near-instant financial relief to keep you in business.’ That transforms their offering from a technical cost center into a true engine of business resilience,” said Candee.

Looking ahead: where Candee sees Cork years into the future

We’ve spoken to Candee several times this year about the opportunities he still sees ahead for Cork and its partners. The company’s mission remains focused on empowering every business with the clarity to see risk, the control to act on it, and the confidence to recover from it.

That guiding mission inspired the company’s recent “SMB Cyber Defense 2026: Expert Strategies for Staying Ahead of Threat Actors” report which aimed to provide advice and actionable insights to MSPs looking to evolve their practices over the next year.

Looking forward, Candee says he wants to continue to build a platform that enables MSPs and other partners to quantify the risk they mitigate for SMB customers.

“Three years from now, I hope to be celebrating our evolution to being the undisputed ‘gold standard’ for merging cyber insight with financial resilience across all business levels. I will want to celebrate that we’re using the vast data from those incidents to help businesses prevent claims from happening in the first place. The ultimate vision is a platform so intelligent that our partners can not only price risk accurately but actively reduce it based on our insights,” said Candee.

“In six years, I want the data to prove that Cork-backed businesses are, measurably, the most cyber-resilient businesses in the world,” he continued.