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BlockHash Podcast featuring Christian Davies, Global Head of Distribution and Innovation at Relm.
In this episode of the BlockHash Podcast, a leading resource for everything that’s happening across the emerging tech space, Christian Davies of Relm joins host Brandon Zemp to explore how new insurance solutions are emerging to cover risks in AI, eb and other innovative sectors. Below, we’ve captured the key highlights of the episode.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what interested you in the insurance side of Web3.
“I’ve been in insurance for 13–14 years now. I’ve been in digital assets for in excess of 10 years purely through my own interest and I’ve always just been a massive nerd. I lost my dissertation because I fried my laptop when I was trying to do this thing called Bitcoin mining when you used to be able to actually do it on a laptop. That was my first foray into digital assets.
I got first my first exposure to crypto insurance when the Winklevoss twins decided to set up a regulated crypto exchange. They wanted to get that whole trust license set up and that was the birth of Gemini. It came across my desk as a broker in Lloyd’s and I thought, how on Earth am I going to ever persuade anyone to actually do some insurance for this?
Two years of working on it, a load of education, trying to explain to chief underwriting officers of multinational insurance companies, and I got nowhere. That brought my decision to leave the insurance industry.
I got introduced to the CEO and founder of Relm about three and a half years ago.
He said we’re building this insurance company from scratch and this is what we insure and I said “no way, I’m at the table.”
We try and ensure we underwrite these risks that I always had an interest in and no-one ever wanted to provide insurance for because they were too busy doing traditional stuff like ‘oh, there’s a warehouse over there.’
Relm is continuing to expand through innovative industries. We’ve launched three AI products. We’ve launched the first true multi-line insurance product for fintechs in the US, and it’s a global product. We support the alternative therapeutic space, longevity, the new space economy.
We’re always trying to figure out how to support these industries as they grow and scale.”
I’m sure there’s so many nuanced ways that risk can present itself in some of these industries that maybe you can’t outline today but might appear tomorrow. Do you have a certain way that you cover those risks or is it something you guys have to mindfully be on the fly trying to understand?
“Internally at Relm, we’re all incredibly curious people and we’re all just a fascinating bunch of nerds. We have a whole product innovation team and one of the guys who joined was the ex-chief innovation officer at one of the really large insurance broking firms. On day one, he didn’t even come into the office. We immediately sent him to an executive course at the UK Space Agency to learn all about space and that’s now his expertise.
The lady who runs that team is a Dr. Claire Davey. She’s an ex-insurance broker and is constantly pushing the boundaries of understanding all these new innovative industries, and all of our underwriters do the same. Everyone in the company is naturally curious, from the accountants to our HR people, to our underwriters, to our distribution. Everyone is, and that’s very much at the heart of it.”
I want to ask about cybersecurity because it’s something that I find very fascinating that’s evolving at a very rapid pace in good ways, but also in bad ways. We’re having more AI powered hacks today, smart contract exploits, ransomware cross-border. I’m curious how cyber insurance, if that’s even a thing yet, is evolving and trying to keep pace with all the changes that are happening?
“There is a cyber insurance market and it’s a pretty big chunky market now. I think it’s tens or hundreds of billions of premium just in the cyber insurance market, but the traditional market is very soft.
It’s incredibly cheap at the moment. It’s incredibly commoditised, and they’re not necessarily picking up on all the new potential threat vectors that we’re looking at, which is why we built these three bespoke AI products to specifically cover AI risk.
From the cyber side with crypto again, because traditional insurance is antiquated, it’s not picked up under the new cyber insurance market. It’s actually in the crime line of insurance, but we don’t really conform to how traditional insurance would expect it to work.
We smash the different coverages together and say look, this is your loss — theft of digital assets will come from a cyber-attack, some kind of manipulation, some kind of AI influence on a smart contract, or the potential ransom of an individual to get access to the company’s seed phrase if they’ve done a really bad mismanagement of their own security and don’t have any of those provisions. We probably wouldn’t have actually offered insurance to a company if it was that bad. But that’s the kind of exposures we’re looking at and that’s where we package all of these different lines and say look, this is how a loss could happen.”
How do you guys assess whether you’re going to insure a company or not based on risk? Do you have a plan in terms of what you look for or how you go about assessing to determine if it’s right to even ensure a high-risk company in the first place?
“We’ve seen in excess of 12,000 companies wanting insurance and we ensure over 2,800 companies in 36 different countries around the world now. So, we have a pretty good internal model of what works and what doesn’t. We’ve looked at over 280 claims just in the Web3 space.
We’re working incredibly closely and collaboratively with our clients who give us a huge amount of information that we can go through and figure out what our best practise is. But it all starts from either a call with the client or what we call a proposal form which is a starting list of 25 questions. Then we build from there depending on exactly what they want covered.”
A lot of companies are focused on growth and scaling. They’re focused on innovating at a fast pace, running as fast as they can, and breaking things is normal for them. A lot of the time they do forget about the risk or it becomes second nature to them. How do you have that conversation with them? How does it go in terms of getting across to them that insurance is really important in this part of the space?
“The last thing any founder ever thinks of is insurance. No-one ever thinks about it. So many people treat it as a commodity and they just forget about it. The best buyers are usually people who have had to use insurance because it’s got them out of a situation.
Founders should be looking at it immediately from day one because, transparently, if you’re not looking at insuring or protecting your balance sheet from day one as you’re doing these fundraisers, you’re not managing the risk of a company. There are a thousand types of risk to a company, not just competition. Insurance should be part of every single founder’s journey.”
What’s on the horizon here for Relm the rest of this year? Are there any new verticals you guys want to dive into? Where’s the focus going to be lying for Relm as we go into the new year?
“There are a few different industry verticals. Like I said, the new space economy is where we’re very heavily investing. We’re launching more products soon. And the alternative therapeutic space as well. The research on post-traumatic stress disorder with psilocybin through medicinal use is also quite fascinating.
The roadmap is trying to keep ahead of innovation or at least try and keep in touch with innovation which, for insurance, is a very foreign thing because it’s always very reactionary rather than proactive.
Coming into 2026, you never know, there might be a whole other new trend coming out that we’ll have to figure out heads around from a risk and liability perspective.”
There’s always something isn’t there especially in these spaces, especially Web3, and AI agents are just around the corner. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of liability there. It’s always getting more complicated and convoluted and things break all the time. So there’s always going to be something. I’m sure it’ll be pretty busy.
“One of the really interesting ones right now is obviously RWAs. But then when we look at the risk, is there any real risk on a private tokenization of asset? Well, potentially not. Public tokenization of asset could be massive and that’s the kind of conversations that we’re having and how insurance can support that.”
