Dubai, UAE — January 27, 2026: Mantas, a Dubai-based startup, has launched from stealth and raised a $1.77 million seed funding round to develop insurance products focused on cloud downtime and related digital risks. The company says it is using a parametric insurance approach—where payouts are triggered by predefined, verifiable outage conditions rather than a traditional claims review—to address the operational and financial impact of cloud service interruptions.
The seed round includes participation from Nuwa Capital, Suhail Ventures, Plus VC, OQAL Angel Syndicate, and a group of strategic angel investors. Mantas said the funding will be used for product development, risk modeling, and early customer deployments across the MENA region and North America.
Mantas is positioning its product around the increasing reliance on hyperscale cloud platforms and the potential for outages to cause immediate disruption. Many businesses now run always-on services where even short periods of downtime can interrupt transactions, halt operations, and affect customer experience. Standard risk-management tools—such as service-level agreements (SLAs), contractual remedies, and resilience engineering—can reduce technical exposure but typically do not guarantee fast financial recovery when disruptions occur. Mantas’ approach is to provide coverage that pays automatically when predefined outage thresholds are met, based on verified outage data.
Basil Mimi, CEO and co-founder, described the target problem as a gap between technical dependence on cloud services and financial protection against failure: “Cloud downtime is now one of the largest unpriced liabilities in the digital economy… Parametric insurance allows us to turn cloud outages into a measurable and insurable risk.”
According to the company, Mantas combines insurance coverage with real-time monitoring intended to help customers track exposure and quantify downtime risk. The coverage is designed for companies whose revenue and operations depend on continuous cloud availability, including fintechs, airlines, e-commerce platforms, SaaS providers, and regulated enterprises. Under the parametric model described by the company, payouts are triggered automatically when outage conditions defined in the policy are met, with the goal of providing liquidity quickly after an incident.
Mantas said the concept originated from Mimi’s experience during a widespread cloud-related disruption that affected a consumer service, which he said escalated into business losses and reputational damage. The team subsequently explored parametric insurance models used in areas such as agriculture and weather events and applied the same payout logic to measurable cloud outages.
The company argues that the need for financial protection is growing as cloud adoption concentrates risk across a small number of critical providers. It also points to differing regional dynamics: in North America, outages can have broad spillover effects across interconnected services, while in the Middle East, governments and enterprises are scaling cloud infrastructure rapidly as part of cloud-first digital transformation initiatives. In both cases, Mantas says financial protection mechanisms have not kept pace with increasing operational dependence.
Investors participating in the round said they view the approach as an attempt to link coverage more directly to observed infrastructure performance and measured downtime, rather than contractual descriptions of service obligations.
Mantas said it plans to expand its platform as cloud and AI infrastructure becomes more interconnected and as outages and failures potentially propagate across dependent services. The company’s stated direction includes extending coverage to additional digital risks while continuing to build monitoring and risk intelligence capabilities intended to help organizations assess exposure before incidents occur.
