Mantas Raises $1.77M to Insure Against Costly Cloud Downtime

Cloud outages used to be brushed off as a technical hiccup. These days, they hit balance sheets fast. That’s the thinking behind Mantas, a UAE-based insurtech that has just stepped out of stealth with a $1.77 million pre-seed round and a rather bold proposition: parametric insurance designed specifically for cloud downtime. In plain English, it means businesses get paid automatically when verified outages occur, without the usual claims back-and-forth that can be a bit of a faff when everything is already on fire.

The funding round brings together Nuwa Capital, Suhail Ventures, Plus VC, OQAL Angel Syndicate and a group of strategic angels. The cash will go into building the product further, sharpening risk models, and rolling out early customer deployments across the MENA region and North America. From where I sit, watching founders across the region scramble whenever AWS sneezes, the timing feels spot on.

The wider backdrop matters. Companies are leaning more heavily than ever on hyperscale cloud infrastructure, especially in markets racing through digital transformation. We’ve all seen it: one small outage, payments freeze, bookings stall, customers get restless. Traditional tools like SLAs and legal clauses rarely offer much comfort in the moment. Mantas is taking a different tack by using parametric insurance, where payouts are triggered by data, not debates. No long investigations, just clear rules and fast liquidity.

Basil Mimi, co-founder and CEO of Mantas, put it bluntly when he pointed to high-profile AWS and Azure outages in late 2025, saying cloud downtime has become “one of the largest unpriced liabilities in the digital economy”. He argues that while systems are engineered for speed and scale, the financial layer hasn’t kept up. Parametric insurance, in his view, finally closes that gap by making outages measurable and insurable in real time.

What’s interesting is how this idea was born. Mimi has spoken about trying to order food during a widespread outage, only to watch a simple glitch snowball into reputational damage and heavy losses for the business involved. As a software engineer, that experience exposed a blind spot: outages were measurable, even predictable, yet largely uninsured. The missing link came from parametric insurance models already used in areas like agriculture and weather risk. I’ve heard similar “aha” moments from founders at Arageek meetups, and honestly, those lived frustrations often make the strongest startups.

Mantas’ coverage is aimed squarely at digital-first businesses, from fintechs and airlines to e-commerce platforms and SaaS companies, especially those operating in regulated environments. Alongside insurance, the platform offers real-time risk monitoring to help teams understand exposure before things go wrong. When predefined outage conditions are met, payouts kick in automatically. That speed can be the difference between calming customers and watching trust evaporate — and I reckon that certainty will resonate strongly in both MENA and North America, where cloud concentration risk is becoming impossible to ignore.

Investors seem to agree. Arnav Danthi from Nuwa Capital has noted that downtime is still treated too often as a technical issue when it’s clearly a financial one, while Plus VC’s Hasan Haider described Mantas as a category-defining play that rethinks cyber insurance through a technology-driven MGA model. Suhail Ventures also highlighted the role of real-time analytics in cutting losses from cyber threats and outages. On the flip side, I’m not a fan of buzzwords for their own sake, but here the mechanics actually map to a real pain point, which definately helps.

Looking ahead, Mantas plans to expand its platform as cloud and AI architectures grow more interconnected and failures start to cascade across services. The long-term ambition is simple enough: make sure businesses aren’t left financially exposed as their tech stacks evolve. It’s a tall order, but if cloud downtime is now part of the cost of doing business, insuring it properly feels like common sense — and about time, you know?

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