Faura, a startup insurtech founded in March 2023, offers climate and property risk analytics for MGAs, carriers and agencies to reduce natural disaster risk exposures.
"For resilience, understanding a building and what components of the building correlate to how likely it is to survive," said Valkyrie Holmes, co-founder and CEO of Faura.
The red-roofed "miracle house" seen untouched after the Maui wildfires when everything else in Lahaina around it was destroyed, survived because it had the right structural components to protect it, Holmes explained. "Honing in on those components is going to be really crucial in both how we build houses in the future and then how we insure them," she said.
Faura has found support for its service, recently receiving $500,000 in funding from Dorm Room Fund, the Honors Fund by CEAS, Metaprop, and Responsibly Ventures. Faura recently entered Metaprop's accelerator program as well. The startup began by covering parts of California and Hawaii that have been affected by wildfires, and has since added Texas and New Mexico, compiling data on about 10,000 homes in all. It has two MGAs, three agencies and a consultancy as clients so far.
Holmes developed the idea for Faura through a variety of work experiences. These included data science for commercial rideshare, at NASA and Space X (effectively the process of "sending things into space," as she said). She received a grant for wildfire prevention work, which led her to think about insurance and sustainability.
"There was a pretty big gap between what homeowners understood about how to reduce the risk on their property and what their risk even was," Holmes said, "and what legacy stakeholders like insurers had the data to be able to price on and how they could get that and make it a more interesting customer experience."
When a homeowner is trying to get an insurance policy and encounters differences between what an insurer can and cannot cover, that carrier can turn to Faura. Faura assesses the property and provides a resilience score and actions that can be done to reduce its risk.
"We give both the underwriting team and agencies a report about whether risk factors are on the property and how they can implement that into their comparative rater or policy management system," Holmes said. "Then for the homeowner, we're giving them action items that comply with their timeline and budget. And since it's directly embedded in the policy, it's giving them direct incentives to get affordable insurance options. In some cases, even bundle with specialty and natural disaster products."
The next step for Faura will be to build capability to assess property vulnerability to other types of natural disasters. The company can also do this for wind damage, and plans to add flood assessment next.
"The end goal is to provide homeowners and business owners with better information about their property to give them a better insurance experience and make the product a lot stickier for insurance companies," Holmes said. "And then for insurance companies to get better information about which properties are most likely to survive."
