Stand raises $70 million at a valuation of $1 billion to insure homes against fire using digital twins

The Californian insurer simulates each house, tree by tree, to assess the fire risk. Its ‘Stand World Model’ is said to have predicted the fate of 310 houses affected by fires with 85 per cent accuracy.

San Francisco-based home insurer Stand has closed a $70 million Series C round led by Saga Ventures, along with Lowercarbon, Eclipse and several other funds, valuing it at $1 billion. The company now covers more than $10 billion in property, up from $1 billion a year earlier, and says it is growing about 15% per month despite operating in only two states: California for fires and Florida for hurricanes.

Rate the house, not the zip code

Rather than classifying homes by geographical area based on past statistics, Stand builds a digital twin of each house — materials, vegetation, wind, weather — and runs fluid mechanics simulations on it. Its in-house model, called the Stand World Model, is a neural network trained to reproduce these physical calculations instantaneously: deleting a tree on the screen immediately varies the premium, up to a difference of more than $1,100 per year for a single well-placed tree.

According to the company, a blind test on about 310 California homes affected by fires in recent years, including the one in Palisades, yielded 85% accurate predictions (burned or spared), compared to 50% to 55% for conventional models — internal figures that Fortune has not been able to verify. The fundraising is to fund expansion in the West and Southeast, and then to the risks of thunderstorms, frost and flooding.