climate-risk
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Michael Gulla Is Teaching Insurance to Move at the Speed of the Weather
After two decades inside insurance, the Austin founder is betting that the next useful policy will behave less like paperwork and more like an if-then statement - watching the event, verifying the trigger and moving money while it can still help.
Alex Kubicek Learned to Read Hail. Then He Rewrote the Policy.
A failed rooftop sensor, more than 100 investor rejections and years of hail data turned a Wisconsin atmospheric scientist into an insurance founder. His wager is simple: when risk gets measured at ground level, it can be priced - and prevented - with far more intelligence.
Steve Weinstein Is Building a Florida Insurer With Bermuda in Its Roots
After three decades studying catastrophe risk from boardrooms in New York and Bermuda, Steve Weinstein chose Florida for his founder’s bet. Mangrove’s strategy is equal parts underwriting discipline, global reinsurance and a stubborn belief that difficult markets can still reward patient builders.
The founder teaching insurers to read a house from the sky
He runs an intelligence unit's worth of pattern recognition on the roofs of 160 million buildings. The question that started it was not about roofs at all.
Francisco Martin-Rayo
Francisco Martin-Rayo is the co-founder and CEO of Helios AI, a climate-risk and commodity-price platform that helps agri-food companies see supply shocks before they hit. A former Mexican-avocado trader who became a BCG principal and AI-fintech executive, he teamed up with ex-Google engineer Eden Canlilar in late 2022 to build an AI that scrapes 250,000 news sources every 15 minutes, runs custom models for dozens of crops, and tells procurement teams when, how much, and where to buy across roughly 90 countries.
Kevin Stein
Kevin Stein is the CEO and cofounder of Delos Insurance Solutions, a San Francisco insurtech MGA that writes homeowners insurance for wildfire-exposed California properties that mainstream carriers refuse. A Bay Area native and aerospace engineer who once sold satellites at SSL/Maxar, Stein co-founded Delos in 2017 with Shanna McIntyre to apply satellite imagery, geospatial AI, and wildfire science to a problem the rest of the market treats as uninsurable. Delos accepts roughly two-thirds of the homes the standard market declines, and Stein reports it has never insured a home that later burned. He moonlights as a bassist and songwriter.
Dan Preston
Dan Preston is the co-founder and CEO of Stand Insurance, a San Francisco-based insurtech company using physics-driven AI and digital property twins to insure climate-impacted homes in wildfire and hurricane zones. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, Preston previously led Metromile as CEO from 2014 to 2022, guiding it through a SPAC IPO on NASDAQ and eventual acquisition by Lemonade. At Stand, he has raised $65 million across two rounds and grown the company to over $1 billion in insured value within its first year, with expansion into Florida's catastrophe market. His vision: insurance as an active driver of community resilience, not just a financial safety net.
Hemant Shah
Hemant Shah is a serial entrepreneur and catastrophe risk pioneer who co-founded Risk Management Solutions (RMS) in 1989 as a Stanford grad student and built it into a $300M+ global leader in catastrophe modeling over nearly 30 years. He then co-founded Archipelago in 2018, an AI-powered commercial property risk data platform that now manages over $12 trillion in insured properties and has raised $72M+ in venture funding. Shah transitioned to Executive Chairman of Archipelago in July 2023 and in 2025 joined FortressFire as Vice Chairman, continuing his mission to bring data intelligence to the most consequential risks facing the built environment.