Eclipse Re issues its first private cat bond of the year, $100m Series 2026-1A

The Eclipse Re Ltd. transformer vehicle has issued its first listed private catastrophe bond notes of the year, with a $100 million Eclipse Re Ltd. (Series 2026-1A) becoming the largest cat bond lite of 2026 so far, Artemis has learned.

Eclipse Re Ltd. is a Bermuda domiciled special purpose insurer (SPI) and segregated account company that operates as a private insurance-linked securities (ILS) and collateralized reinsurance transformer and issuance platform.

The structure is owned and operated by insurance-linked securities (ILS) market facilitator and service provider Artex Capital Solutions and has also been known to be a platform regularly used by ILS managers including Fermat Capital Management as a way to securitise tranches of risk for their funds.

The Eclipse Re structure enables efficient issuance of private catastrophe bonds, or other privately issued and placed insurance-linked securities.

The use-cases can be as a mechanism to help sponsors access the capital markets efficiently by providing a function as a risk transformation structure, or by operating on behalf of ILS fund managers and investors within their origination, sourcing and securitization of investments.

These can be securitizations of cedent-specific risk transfer deals, or of a slice of a reinsurance tower participation. Or even the securitization of ILS fund-to-fund hedges.

Details are limited as always with this first Eclipse Re deal of 2026, given the private nature of these cat bonds, so we can’t be certain of the motives or exact features of this new deal, or who is behind it.

You can view the details of every private cat bond issuance we’ve tracked by flitering our extensive cat bond Deal Directory.

This new Eclipse Re deal takes total private cat bond issuance tracked by Artemis in 2026 $175 million year-to-date, still tracking far behind full-year 2025’s $626.51 million, 2024’s $455.52 million and 2023’s $641.93 million.

This first Eclipse Re private cat bond from the platform in 2026, saw the structure issuing a $100 million tranche of Series 2026-1A notes, that we presume will cover some type of property catastrophe reinsurance or retrocessional perils for an unknown cedent. We also do not have any details on the trigger type, risk metrics or pricing, as is typical with these private cat bonds.

The $100 million of Series 2026-1A notes have been issued on behalf of Eclipse Re’s Segregated Account EC0078 and the notes have a final maturity date of December 31st 2027.

The maturity date is further out than with many private cat bonds, so it’s assumed that the $100 million of Series 2026-1A notes are a securitization of greater than one year duration reinsurance or retrocession arrangement by Eclipse Re.

The $100 million of Series 2026-1A notes issued by Eclipse Re have been privately placed with qualified investors and listed on the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX).

We make the assumption this private cat bond features a reinsurance or retrocession arrangement, likely covering property catastrophe risks, that has been transformed using the Eclipse Re structure, to create and issue a series of investable, securitized cat bond notes, normally for an ILS fund manager or investor’s portfolio.

The proceeds from the sale of the $100 million of private cat bond notes from this 2026-1A series of private ILS notes issued by Eclipse Re are expected to have been used to collateralize a related reinsurance or retrocession contract, with funds held in a trust.

Last year, the Eclipse Re structure brought $218.2 million of private cat bonds to market that we tracked, which made it the most prolific issuer of listed private ILS transactions of 2025.

You can analyse private cat bond issuance by year in our chart that breaks down all our tracked issuance by type here.

2017 was the record year for private cat bonds tracked by Artemis, at just over $1.12 billion of issuance recorded.

View the details of every private cat bond issuance we’ve tracked by flitering our extensive cat bond Deal Directory.