In the last three years, the US experienced 73 weather and climate disasters that amounted to more than $460 billion in property damage. Due to climate change, these disasters are expected to become more frequent and intense, as shown by the recent wildfires in Los Angeles and Hurricane Milton in Florida. This makes it crucial for insurers and property owners to understand the risks and trends associated with these events.
Nearly half of US homes are currently facing severe climate-related risks, and this number is increasing due to the worsening environmental crisis and resulting extreme weather. In some areas, insurance costs are rising dramatically, and in others, insurers are reducing or refusing coverage. As a result, more homeowners will need guidance on risk mitigation strategies to meet insurance requirements and protect their property. Currently, 1 in 13 homes are uninsured, and this number will continue to grow if not addressed. Considering the existing affordability and supply crisis, we cannot afford to further decrease the housing supply by deeming it uninsurable due to imprecise underwriting practices. Therefore, we’re excited to announce our investment in Faura, a startup that addresses these issues by offering a better way to underwrite and mitigate risk.
Data is crucial to keep risks insurable. Faura’s proprietary resilience models analyze individual structures and generate custom mitigation plans, providing insurers and policyholders with actionable data to promote informed decision-making. This data-driven approach creates a positive feedback loop that incentivizes policyholders with enhanced benefits while simultaneously minimizing insurer losses.
Since its founding in early 2023, Faura has quickly made its mark on the industry. To date, insurers have completed thousands of property assessments using Faura’s platform. And the team’s accomplishments have been widely recognized. The company won both the State Farm Pitch Competition at InsureTech Connect and the Guidewire InsurPitch, and it was named an InsurTech Vanguard.
The company’s platform has recently undergone a significant expansion, now encompassing assessments for all five NATCAT risks: wildfire, hurricane, hail, flood, and earthquake. Faura’s suite of tools empowers underwriters to conduct both manual and rapid assessments, enabling them to comprehensively evaluate a property’s resilience against all five potential perils.
Faura also extends its services to homeowners through its Policyholder Inspection Tool. This tool enables homeowners to perform accurate self-assessments of their properties. These self-assessments can then be leveraged to qualify homeowners for a range of benefits, including discounts, grants, and other incentives, based on the mitigation efforts they have undertaken.
Faura’s platform enables homeowners to perform accurate self-assessments of their properties, which can lead to benefits including discounts, grants, and other incentives, based on the mitigation efforts they have undertaken.
“Many see properties in wildfire or flood zones as untouchable. We believe there’s a better approach to unlock opportunities for everyone,” said Valkyrie Holmes, Co-founder and CEO of Faura. Combining her interests in data science and electrical engineering, Valkyrie interned at NASA and SpaceX, then joined the 776 Foundation to focus on combatting climate change full-time. It was then, over two years ago that she fortuitously met her now co-founder, Amanda Southworth, on the r/wildfires subreddit.
Amanda, co-founder and CTO, has a background in building and launching web and mobile applications specifically focused on complex communities and social issues. Both founders also have a personal appreciation for the impact of the climate crisis on wildfires. Valkyrie saw her hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada, become increasingly affected over time, and while growing up in Southern California, Amanda experienced evacuations as commonplace. Amanda shares, “Faura’s tools go beyond measuring survivability; they scale solutions to meet the massive demand for disaster mitigation [allowing] us to address one of the largest solvable challenges of our time.”
When founding Faura, Valkyrie and Amanda quickly realized that insurers and policyholders feel similarly helpless and underinformed when underwriting and mitigating risk—predictive models and actionable home interventions falling short for both stakeholders. Faura helps insurers better understand property risk from the lens of survivability. Instead of using a typical climate model to approximate where a disaster will hit a given county or zip code, Faura uses proprietary resilience models to analyze individual structures and pair them with mitigation plans that help both underwriters and policyholders make more informed decisions about their properties. The goal is to create a positive feedback loop for policyholders to qualify for more insurance benefits while reducing the losses to the insurers themselves, generating more value with every policy. Valkyrie sums it up as: “Everything we do at Faura is done to continue pushing the insurance industry forward into a more resilient and profitable future. We realized that there was so much locked-up opportunity and that if we could align homeowners and underwriters, we could create massive ripple effects in the market.”
Faura Co-founder & CEO Valkyrie Holmes and Co-founder and CTO Amanda Southworth at Insurtech Insights in 2024.
We were first introduced to Faura in early 2024 through our friends at MetaProp, who mentored the startup through their accelerator program. We continued to develop our relationship with Faura throughout our mutual involvement in NYC Climate Week and other events, until finally we were all able to team up with our friends at Harlem Capital to fund Faura’s first round of capital.
We are delighted to co-lead Faura’s $3.5 million Seed Round alongside Harlem Capital, with participation from MetaProp, Triple Five, and Dorm Room Fund. I will be joining the board, and the entire Building Ventures team is looking forward to working with Valkyrie and Amanda as they continue to grow Faura. This year, Faura is onboarding Tier 1 insurance carriers, managing general agencies (MGAs), and data providers to deliver comprehensive solutions for high-risk property insurance. Additionally, with this funding, Faura will expand its lean team of 9 to better serve its customers, further develop its platform, and continue to grow the all-in-one tool for analyzing and incentivizing the natural disaster resilience of homes and commercial structures. The BV team is thrilled to be on this exciting journey with Faura working #forabetterbuiltworld.
Learn more about Faura here.
