Introducing Stand, the Climate-Resilient Insurer
Covering the world's climate-impacted properties
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in the Seed and Series A of Stand, a climate-resilient insurer that is transforming the property insurance market and today announced its launch.
Few industries face greater disruption from climate volatility than insurance, as traditional methods for assessing risk increasingly prove inadequate in the face of worsening weather volatility and ballooning losses from natural catastrophes. Access to affordable, predictable, and complete private coverage is already out of reach for millions of homeowners and businesses, and state-owned alternatives are struggling to fill the gap. This is both a systemic risk to the global economy and an existential risk to profitability of P&C insurers. Carriers are rapidly exiting markets and slowing new business – a trend that has risen to front-page news headlines over the past 18 months.
The scale of the problem is staggering: an estimated $22T of home values are at risk from extreme climate events, and climate change is among the top concerns articulated across the $100B+ property insurance ecosystem.
Given the size of the opportunity and the cross-functional overlap between Equal’s focus on insurance and climate, our team spent much of 2023 “on the hunt” for innovators taking a big swing in this category. We met with countless brokers, underwriters, property managers, carriers, and reinsurance experts to develop a “prepared mind” on property insurance innovation. As we’ve written about before, we evaluated the ways in which incumbents will struggle to evolve their pricing models and the structural complexities that lead to sub-optimal levels of resiliency deployment. Ultimately, our team became very excited about the opportunity to build a next-gen property insurer with mitigation and resiliency at its core, and we set out to identify a team that could meet such an ambitious task.
That’s where Stand comes in. Founded by Dan Preston, the former CEO of Metromile, Jason Mueller (formerly CPO of Policygenius), Sam Shank (formerly CEO of HotelTonight), and Bill Clerico (formerly CEO of WePay), this team combines unparalleled expertise in insurance, technology, and climate resilience. Their vision? To tackle the industry’s most pressing challenges with a comprehensive, data-driven platform that moves beyond point solutions and redefines risk modeling, underwriting, and mitigation strategies. Meeting Dan and his co-founders confirmed what we’ve long believed: solving this problem requires an exceptional team with a bold approach.
The combination of (objectively) a truly outstanding team and a thesis we were pounding the table for made it clear that we had found our bet in this category. We were proud to lead Stand’s first round of financing and to participate in its Series A earlier this year alongside our friends at Inspired Capital and lowercarbon. We are confident Dan, Jason, Sam, and Bill are on track to build a generational insurance platform and we couldn’t be more excited to back them from day zero.
In an exceptionally short period of less than one year, the team has already risen to the occasion, demonstrating their ability to get capacity/reinsurance in arguably the single most challenging geography and to launch their first product in the market.
Stand is just getting started on the journey to redefine what’s possible in climate resiliency, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.