Exclusive: Stand raises $70 million at $1 billion valuation to price wildfire risk by treating homes like airplanes in flight
Source: Fortune ·
Only a few years old, Stand says its digital twins predicted wildfire outcomes about 85% of the time in a backtest, versus 50%–55% for conventional models.
From the source
Matt DiStefano shares his screen and rotates a gray 3D model of a California neighborhood. He zooms in on one house and overlays a heat map. Red contours run along the sides and back, where trees stand close to the home. Blue sits near the pool. Then he starts deleting trees. Removing one takes more than $1,100 a year off the home’s premium. Another, he says, “doesn’t contribute as much.” “This one’s the one that matters,” DiStefano says of the first tree. He is Stand’s 29-year-old chief science officer and he’s demoing, via screen share, Stand’s proprietary digital twin technology that hopes to solve the insurance industry’s multibillion-dollar problem. The San Francisco home insurer is announcing today a $70 million Series C raise at a $1 billion valuation, Fortune can exclusively reveal. Its argument is that insurers have been pricing wildfire risk the wrong way, by looking backward at statistics and sorting homes by zip code. Stand says the better approach is to simulate each…