Series B insurance: scaling the programme

Reviewed by Matthew Bartlett, Director, Apex Insurance Brokers Limited · Last reviewed 2026-08-06

By Series B, the shape of your company has changed. You are no longer a small team proving a thesis — you are a business hiring quickly, signing contracts that carry real liability, holding more customer data, and often operating across borders. The insurance programme that felt sensible at Series A was built for a smaller, simpler organisation. It rarely stretches to fit the one you are becoming.

This guide walks through what a scaling company should review at Series B and, just as importantly, why the limits and structures from earlier rounds tend to be outgrown. The goal is not to bolt on every product available — it is to make sure the cover you carry actually matches the exposures you now run.

What changes about your risk at Series B?

Three things drive the shift. First, headcount: you may double or triple the team, and every hire, manager and termination decision adds employment risk. Second, contract size and complexity: enterprise customers negotiate harder on liability, indemnities and insurance requirements. Third, data and geography: more customer records, more systems, and often a first office or client base outside the UK. Each of these maps onto a specific part of the programme, and each is a reason a Series A limit no longer holds.

It is worth naming the trap here. Renewals often roll forward on autopilot — the same limits, the same wordings — because nobody has stopped to ask whether the business behind the policy still resembles the one that bought it. At Series B, that assumption is usually wrong.

Why do D&O limits usually need to increase?

Directors' and officers' (D&O) insurance protects your directors and the company against claims alleging wrongful acts in how the business is run — from an investor, employee, regulator, creditor or competitor. It is not a legal requirement. It is, however, very commonly required by investors, and many term sheets from Series A onward make it a condition of the round.

The limit you agreed at Series A was calibrated to a smaller company with fewer stakeholders. By Series B you have more investors on the cap table, a larger board, bigger commercial commitments and a higher profile — all of which raise both the likelihood and the potential size of a claim. New Series B investors will frequently expect the limit to step up as part of their own diligence.

There is a practical nuance worth flagging: the individuals most exposed under D&O are your directors personally, because their own assets can be at stake where company indemnification fails. That makes the adequacy of the limit a governance question, not just a procurement one. If you want the mechanics in depth, our guide to directors' and officers' insurance explained covers how the cover responds and what the common exclusions mean.

Larger or more complex risk? Speak directly to a director — call 0117 325 0027 or email info@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk.

Do we need employment practices liability now?

This is often the biggest gap in a Series B programme. Employment practices liability (EPL) covers claims arising from the employment relationship — allegations such as unfair dismissal, discrimination, harassment, or failure to promote. It is a genuine, established product, usually bought either as a standalone policy or as an extension to a management liability programme alongside D&O.

Two points founders sometimes conflate, so it is worth separating them clearly:

• Employers' liability insurance is a separate, legally required cover. Once you employ staff you must hold it under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, subject to some narrow exceptions, and there are penalties for failing to do so. It responds to employees who are injured or made ill because of their work.
• Employment practices liability is not compulsory. It responds to the employment disputes — the tribunal claim, the discrimination allegation — that become statistically more likely as your headcount and management layers grow.

The reason EPL earns its place specifically at Series B is that rapid hiring is also rapid exposure. More managers making more decisions about more people means more chances for a dispute — and defending even an unfounded claim carries cost. A programme built when you were fifteen people rarely accounts for the HR risk of being a hundred.

How much cyber cover do we actually need?

At Series B you typically hold materially more data than you did a year ago — more customers, more employees, more integrations and more systems that can fail or be attacked. Cyber insurance responds to incidents such as data breaches, ransomware, business interruption from an outage, and the notification, forensic and legal costs that follow. Just as valuable as the indemnity is the incident-response support most cyber policies bundle in — the specialists who help you contain and manage a breach when it happens.

The question is less "do we need it" and more "at what limit". A nominal limit bought early to satisfy a single customer requirement is rarely enough once you are processing significantly more data and signing contracts that impose their own cyber and security obligations. Enterprise customers increasingly specify a minimum cyber limit in their contracts, and your programme has to keep pace with what you are agreeing to. Our overview of cyber insurance for startups goes into how the cover is structured and what drives the limit you should be carrying.

What is crime or fidelity cover, and why now?

Commercial crime cover — sometimes called fidelity cover — protects the company against losses from dishonest acts such as employee theft, fraud, and increasingly social-engineering and payment-diversion attacks where someone is tricked into sending funds to a fraudster. It is a real, well-established product, and Series B is a natural point to consider it because your finance function is scaling.

Early on, the founder or a single finance hire signs off everything. By Series B you have a finance team, more people with access to payment systems, higher transaction volumes and more counterparties — which widens the surface for both internal dishonesty and external fraud. As the number of hands touching money grows, so does the case for cover that responds when a payment goes to the wrong place.

Will our professional indemnity limit still hold?

Professional indemnity (PI) covers claims that your product, advice or service caused a client a financial loss — a defect, an error, a failure to deliver as promised. If you sold to smaller customers at Series A, your PI limit was probably sized for smaller contracts. At Series B you are likely signing larger deals with enterprise clients, and those contracts frequently specify a minimum PI limit as a condition of doing business.

Two things tend to move together here: the contractual limit your customers demand, and the real-world size of a loss they could suffer if something went wrong. Both point upward as your contracts grow. It is worth reviewing PI at Series B not because the risk is new, but because the scale of it has changed — and an outgrown limit can quietly block a deal at the procurement stage.

What about expanding into new markets and geographies?

International expansion is one of the clearest reasons Series A cover stops fitting. Moving into a new country can change your insurance picture in ways that are easy to miss:

• Some policies are written to respond only within specified territories, so cover written for a UK-only business may not answer a claim brought abroad.
• Certain countries require locally admitted insurance — cover placed with a locally licensed insurer — for some classes, which a single UK policy cannot satisfy on its own.
• Employing people overseas introduces local employment law and, in turn, local insurance obligations that differ from the UK's.
• Regulatory exposure, including data protection regimes in other jurisdictions, can widen your D&O and cyber exposure.

The mechanics here vary meaningfully by country and by policy, so this is an area where founders benefit from specific advice rather than assumptions. If you are opening an entity, hiring, or serving customers in a new market, it is worth a conversation before you rely on your existing programme to travel with you. Our stage guide to Series A insurance sets out the baseline this programme is building on.

What drives the cost of a Series B programme?

There is no single figure, and anyone quoting one without knowing your business is guessing. What we can be precise about are the factors that shape the premium:

• The limits and covers you buy, and how they are structured together.
• Your sector, revenue and the nature of what you sell.
• Headcount and the shape of your team and management.
• The data you hold and your security controls.
• Your geographic footprint and where you operate.
• The contractual requirements your customers impose on you.
• Your claims history and the maturity of your governance.

Illustrative limits — say £1m, £5m or £10m on a given policy — are useful only as options to weigh against your exposures and your contracts, never as a statement of what your firm will pay or must carry. The right structure is the one built around your specific position, which is exactly what a broker who knows scale-ups is for.

A practical Series B review checklist

When we sit down with a company closing a Series B, we work through the whole programme rather than renewing piecemeal. The questions we ask are:

• Does the D&O limit reflect the new cap table, board and investor expectations?
• Is employment practices liability in place, given the pace of hiring?
• Is employers' liability correctly held for every employee?
• Does the cyber limit match the data you now hold and the contracts you sign?
• Is crime or fidelity cover warranted as the finance function scales?
• Does the PI limit meet what enterprise customers require?
• Do any policies need to respond internationally, and do they?
• Are the term-sheet insurance conditions from this round actually satisfied?

Series B is the round where insurance stops being a box to tick and becomes part of how you run a maturing company — protecting the directors who steer it, the team you are building, the data you hold and the customers you are winning. Reviewed properly and early, the programme quietly does its job. Left to roll forward on last year's assumptions, it is where the gaps hide. If you would rather have someone walk it through with you, speak to an Apex specialist and we will take it from there.

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 724952). This article is general information, not advice on a specific policy or a recommendation to buy any product.