When a small business in Southeast Asia gets locked out by ransomware, the first call for help can still feel like shouting into the void. That gap is what drove Quantum to create Cyber Hotline – a free AI-powered service for anyone in Asia hit by a cyber breach.
Launched this year, the tool acts as a “first responder” through a conversational chatbot via web and WhatsApp. It offers basic triage, general guidance and emotional support, especially for individual users who often report being hacked or stalked. Once an issue is detected, the chatbot identifies the type of incident, language needs and user profile, routing serious cases to vetted local experts when necessary.
“The Cyber Hotline is mostly being used by individuals who’ve been dealing with a cyberattack for a long time,” says Timothée Grange, co-founder and CEO of Quantum. “We often see the same pattern: people saying their social networks have been hacked, that someone is chasing them or breaking into their phone, and so on.”
Scaling cyber support for insurers
Behind the free public tool lies a sophisticated commercial operation. Quantum offers insurers and corporates a separate white-label version of the Hotline. While it runs on the same AI core, this version is customised to serve their policyholders and incident response workflows. The enterprise version integrates with insurers’ vendor panels, legal frameworks and claims processes – delivering tailored triage, policy-specific prompts and direct vendor handovers.
“The business model is completely different, because in most cases, cyber insurers already have preferred vendors on their panel. In those situations, we provide access to the hotline for their insured clients, who can interact with the AI based on pre-defined conditions set by the insurer,” Grange explains.
Each insurer-branded version is priced through a license model that scales with complexity. A single-market tool with one escalation path costs less than a multi-country solution with complex legal privacy triggers and multiple workflows.
“With AI, automation and innovation, we cannot continue to charge by the hour,” he says. “We have to change the business model, and we can’t be punished for being quicker and more efficient.”
To maintain quality control, Quantum keeps the Hotline’s knowledge base closed and vetted, pulling only from approved guides. It doesn’t give legal advice or coverage decisions; its job ends at triage and handover.
The free public version also serves another strategic purpose – a marketing funnel to attract small businesses without cyber policies, generating potential leads for insurers and vendors looking to expand coverage or services.
“One of our added values is that we know the ecosystem,” Grange notes. “We’ve been working on cyber claim response for the past 12 years in the Asia Pacific and before in Europe. We know the different vendors – DFIR companies, lawyers, PR firms and so on. The point is to step by step generate leads through the platform and feed them to build up the commercial pipeline.”
The platform also gathers valuable insights. Logging real-world incident types, geographies and user concerns helps insurers develop actuarial models and track vendor performance through dashboards and KPIs.
“Cyber is still a relatively new risk, and underwriters often struggle with pricing due to limited data. That’s why gathering incident data will be crucial going forward,” he emphasizes. “Today, many insurers rely on call centres, which don’t provide much visibility into vendor performance or response quality. But with a unified platform, you can track the entire workflow, measure response quality and set KPIs for different vendors.”
Targeting Asian markets
The data-driven approach is a good fit with Asian markets, where cyber response tends to be less legally driven than in the US. “In cyber insurance initially, [Asia] wanted to replicate the American model,” Grange explains. “In the US, the response is very legally driven. In Asia, this is much less true because there’s no mandatory notification, and privacy regulation is only just starting in some jurisdictions.”
The business is self-funded through Quantum’s existing loss-adjusting operations. While the current volume in Asia remains relatively low compared to Western markets, the region shows promising growth signs. APAC has seen the fastest relative growth in claims and demand, with a 22% rise in cyber insurance claims in 2024 over the prior year, driven by a significant increase in cyberattacks, particularly ransomware.
Softening premiums, increased market capacity and stricter privacy regulations in markets like Singapore and Malaysia are pushing more businesses to seek cyber protection. If that trend holds, Grange bets that companies will demand faster response solutions than what traditional call centres can provide.
“There’s no high volume of claims, absolutely not. But there is a market here. To have a one-stop shop for their cyber response solution will make a lot of sense for them,” Grange observes.
Going forward, Quantum plans to add voice support and vendor booking calendar integration to speed up live handovers. The company is also developing tools to help insurers estimate potential loss costs earlier, aiming to bring the speed of property claims triage to cyberspace.
“[The tools] will probably come by the end of this year [or] next year, to have potential loss projection to help claim handlers reserve their claim as soon as possible,” he says.
