CLAI Ventures Invests in FutureProof: The Future of Climate-Resilient Insurance
At CLAI Ventures, our thesis has always been anchored in the belief that AI’s greatest impact will be felt in industries where data is abundant but precision is lacking. Perhaps no industry fits this description better than insurance, specifically as it grapples with the escalating volatility of climate change.
Today, we are announcing our investment in FutureProof, a company founded to solve a specific market failure: the inability of traditional property insurance companies to accurately price climate risk at the asset level.
The Problem: Information Asymmetry in Underwriting
The traditional methodologies used in property insurance rely on historical weather data, subjective human judgment, and very coarse geographic grids. They often fail to account for the specific vulnerability of a structure, such as roof shape, window protection, or local vegetation density.
Because incumbents lack the tools to differentiate between a resilient home and a vulnerable one, they have adopted a strategy of broad exclusion, withdrawing from high-risk states like Florida and California, leaving a massive gap in the $100B+ property insurance market. This “protection gap” represents a massive market opportunity for firms that can provide high-resolution underwriting.
The Solution: Translating Climate Risk into Financial Risk
The powerhouse founding team of Alisa Valderrama (a project finance and climate policy expert) and Alex Gelber (a Harvard PhD economist and tenured professor) initially focused on risk analytics. They soon pivoted to insurance, realizing that climate data is most valuable when tied directly to a premium.
FutureProof is leveraging its AI-based technology, which prices asset-specific resilience measures that can greatly reduce risk, to build property insurance products that foster climate resilience at an unprecedented scale.
Their lower-priced insurance for resilient structures gives property owners a direct incentive to invest in resilience. This creates aligned outcomes across the ecosystem: consumers benefit from better pricing; brokers use FutureProof’s API and differentiated underwriting to win business more efficiently; carriers and reinsurers source higher-quality risk; and communities become more physically and financially resilient to disasters.
Their technology stack differentiates itself through:
Vulnerability Modules: Rather than just modeling the hazard (the storm), they use AI to model the vulnerability (the damage). They integrate high-resolution drone imagery and real-time third-party data to identify features traditional models miss.
Performance: Since launching as a Managing General Agent (MGA) in August 2024, they have written approximately $1B in total insured value with a loss ratio that is an order of magnitude better than insurers operating in similar states and lines.
Adverse Selection Arbitrage: By pricing individual risks based on engineering-level data, FutureProof can “price out” high-loss properties while capturing high-premium, low-risk assets that competitors have abandoned.
Strategic Roadmap: The MGA-to-Carrier Transition
FutureProof currently operates as an MGA, earning a fee for underwriting on behalf of other carriers. However, the team is actively transitioning toward becoming a full-stack insurance carrier.
The economics of this move are compelling. By taking risk onto their own balance sheet, they capture the full underwriting profit and avoid the “fronting fees” paid to partner carriers. To manage this transition, they are building a portfolio of resilient assets across the U.S. FutureProof has been most active in the Southeast, with a focus on Florida, and is targeting launches in California and several other states in 2026.
Why We Invested: One of the Best Expressions of Climate Adaptation
We view FutureProof as one of the best expressions of a Climate Adaptation solution in the market today. While most climate-tech focuses on mitigation (preventing future emissions), adaptation is the urgent task of managing the volatility already baked into our environment.
By creating a financial incentive for resilience, where a better roof leads to a lower premium, FutureProof is not just an insurance company; they are a critical piece of infrastructure for a warming world. They have demonstrated that with the right data, “un-insurable” markets are actually high-alpha opportunities.
We are excited to join the FutureProof team on this journey!
This post was written by Ajay Gupta and the CLAI Ventures team, a Silicon Valley-based fund investing at the intersection of AI and climate. You can reach us at ajay@clai.vc and team@clai.vc.