The first thing to understand about Michael Gulla is that he finds insurance exciting. He says this plainly, with the cheerful self-awareness of a person who knows the sentence will not be printed on a T-shirt. Twenty-plus years in the trade have not cured him. They have made the fascination more specific: the moment a sprawling, regulated institution notices a problem early enough to be useful.
His latest problem is the power outage that never becomes a national disaster. A transformer fails. A summer storm takes down a line. A neighborhood restaurant loses refrigeration, a shop loses a day of sales, a small manufacturer loses a shift. The building may be intact and the conventional policy may be perfectly respectable. Yet payroll, spoiled inventory and missed orders have the vulgar habit of arriving before an adjuster has finished asking questions.
Gulla co-founded Austin-based Adaptive Insurance with technologist Arik Yelovitch in 2024 to work in this awkward interval. Their platform builds specialty coverage around agreed events and independent data. For its GridProtect product, the event is a power outage of a chosen duration. Once third-party data verifies that the threshold has been crossed, the policy can release a predefined amount. The customer does not have to begin by itemizing every lost sandwich and idle hour.
01 / The useful minuteA policy can be correct and still be late
Parametric insurance sounds forbidding until Gulla translates it into the language of a modest computer program: if this happens, then I get that. The event and payment are settled in advance. The argument after the event shrinks because much of it occurred before the customer bought the policy. Traditional indemnity coverage asks what the policyholder lost and works toward restoring it. A parametric policy asks whether the specified thing happened and, if it did, moves the agreed cash.
The distinction is important because speed is not decorative in a disrupted business. Liquidity buys a generator, replaces food, covers wages or pays for a temporary location. Adaptive has described payments arriving in days rather than the months a conventional claim can take. The policy is a financial bridge, not a promise that every loss will be made whole. Gulla's pitch works best when he resists the temptation to declare the old system obsolete.
Parametric is essentially an if/then statement - if this happens, then I get that.Michael Gulla
He prefers a less apocalyptic comparison. Parametric coverage, he says, resembles streaming when cable still owned the living room. Cable supplied the large bundle. Streaming offered a narrower thing, selected on purpose and available on demand. People eventually understood that one could sit beside the other. In Gulla's version, a broad traditional policy does the heavy rebuilding while a focused trigger provides cash for the peril and the hour that matter now.
The parametric loop
02 / ApprenticeshipTwenty years of learning where the machinery sticks
Adaptive did not emerge from a founder discovering insurance on a Tuesday and promising to disrupt it by Friday. Gulla's education was long and unusually operational. He began at Nationwide in catastrophe management and underwriting in the Southeast. His work included the response around the Tuscaloosa tornadoes of 2011. Catastrophe work makes the purpose of insurance vivid, but it also exposes the distance between a household's urgent needs and the industry's measured processes.
He moved through Allstate and Esurance, helping build a direct-to-consumer home insurance program and expand it across 35 states. At Esurance he led underwriting development for the company's first home quote that a customer could bind online. Today, an online quote feels less like invention than plumbing. That is how useful innovations age: they lose their glamour and become the minimum one expects.
In 2016, Gulla joined Hippo as its first insurance hire. The title sounds tidy. The job was not. He worked across underwriting, product development, compliance and regulation, and helped establish the company's Austin office. He also spearheaded a smart-home program that used connected devices to mitigate household losses. Sensors could spot water or smoke before damage expanded. The insurer's relationship with a customer no longer had to begin after the unfortunate event.
The smart-home work and the later parametric work share a family resemblance. Both move the insurer's attention to the left, toward observation and intervention. Both turn outside information into a practical action. Both ask whether a policy can do something before a customer has assembled a folder of receipts under bad fluorescent lighting.
03 / The founder turnStart with the gap, then earn the speed
After Hippo and a stint directing product management and innovation at Verisk, Gulla spent roughly three years advising managing general agents and insurance startups. The timing mattered. The exuberant insurtech market had begun to discover that elegant apps do not repeal underwriting discipline, capital requirements or state regulation. Gulla's consulting work put him close to operators dealing with the hangover.
He began exploring new insurance products with the Montauk climate venture studio founded by Philip Krim. The concept that became Adaptive joined Gulla's insurance experience with Yelovitch's technology background. The company would use third-party data, automated triggers and event verification to cover the smaller, more frequent disruptions that sit awkwardly inside conventional products.
GridProtect arrived first in 2025, launched with capacity from Tokio Marine HCC and an initial reach of 18 states. The choice of outages was almost comically uncinematic, which was precisely the point. Businesses do not require a named hurricane to lose a refrigerator of stock or a Saturday of revenue. Aging infrastructure, severe weather and growing power demand can all make the lights unreliable. A specific, observable outage is also the sort of event that data can verify cleanly.
I consider us a climate resiliency company at heart.Michael Gulla
Adaptive has since moved beyond the grid. Its portfolio includes wind and hail deductible buy-back coverage for commercial and residential properties, residential flood insurance, equipment breakdown coverage and the technology platform behind Tokio Marine HCC's Restaurant Recovery program. The products vary. The theme is continuity: give a household or business a clearer way to manage the gap between what happened and what traditional protection was built to handle.
The financing has followed in two equal chapters. Adaptive announced a $5 million seed round in 2025. In July 2026 it closed another $5 million from new and existing backers, bringing the disclosed total to $10 million. Gulla said the money would expand products, coverage and markets, grow agent and partner distribution, and continue work on the company's climate intelligence platform. It is a sober use of capital for a sober industry: more things to sell, more places to sell them and better machinery underneath.
04 / Operating systemThe regulated-industry advantage
Gulla's edge is not that he ignores the habits of insurance. It is that he knows which habits protect customers and which merely consume their time. Regulatory fluency, carrier capacity, broker relationships and reliable event data are not obstacles pasted onto the product after the demo. They are the product. His career has placed him on enough sides of the system to treat collaboration as engineering rather than diplomacy.
That explains his public enthusiasm for carriers and brokers working together, and for competitors sharing what helps a market mature. It also explains the company he keeps. Adaptive's investors sit around climate, insurance and technology. Its carrier and data partnerships supply pieces a small team should not pretend to manufacture alone. The founder's job is not to own every ingredient. It is to make sure the ingredients produce a policy a customer can understand and a regulator can trust.
His communication style follows the same discipline. There is the if-then statement. There is cable and streaming. There is the simple observation that a customer wants money at the moment it can preserve choices. Insurance language often turns uncertainty into fog. Gulla turns it into a sequence.
He also talks about the people behind the sequence. In one recent note of gratitude, he thanked not only Adaptive's employees but the support system around them: 10 children with one on the way, five spouses, one fiancé, three cats and five dogs. It was funny because it was accounting, and affectionate because the ledger admitted what startup biographies often crop out. The neat company diagram rests on a very untidy number of dinners, school runs and animals demanding to be let outside.
05 / What travelsThe lesson hiding inside the outage
Gulla's story offers a useful correction to the mythology of instant reinvention. The visible company began in 2024. The founder thesis accumulated for two decades. Catastrophe work taught urgency. Direct-to-consumer underwriting taught convenience. Smart-home sensors taught prevention. Compliance taught constraint. Consulting taught what happens when a market cycle sobers up. Adaptive is less a sudden pivot than a compression of those lessons into one platform.
The product lesson is equally portable. Look for the delay between the customer's problem and the industry's response. Ask what can be agreed before the bad event. Find an independent signal both sides can trust. Make the output useful at the exact moment choices begin to vanish. None of this requires pretending the old system has no value. Often the sharper opportunity is a complementary layer that does one job with unusual clarity.
Insurance will remain an argument with uncertainty, and weather is becoming a more impolite opponent. Gulla's wager is that some of the argument can happen earlier, in quiet rooms, before the line goes down. Choose the threshold. Price the risk. Watch the data. When the grid finally sneezes, the policy should already know what to do.