The number of annual wildfires has increased dramatically in recent years. Last year, California experienced 8,619 wildfires, burning almost 2.6 million acres including 3,629 damaged or destroyed structures.
One local company is using AI to help the real estate and insurance industries assess and plan for climate-related risks. Zesty.ai, a property risk analytics provider, announced Tuesday it raised $33 million in Series B funding led by Centana Growth Partners to help mitigate natural disaster risk.
Based in Oakland, Zesty.ai’s software is able to build a digital twin of any building in North America and compare that to decades of historic natural disaster data to give insurers and real estate companies precise risk intelligence.
So far the company’s climate risk products have been a success. Insurance companies across the country have adopted Zesty.ai’s predictive software including Amica, Aon, Berkshire Hathaway, Cincinnati Insurance, Farmers Insurance and The California FAIR Plan, among others.
“Real estate is the world’s largest store of wealth with more than $300 trillion in global assets, but unfortunately the way the world understands value and risk in real estate is based on outdated inspections and decades-old risk maps,” Zesty.ai co-founder and CEO Attila Toth said in a statement. “That analog view of real estate has been especially apparent in trying to understand the impact of climate risk on property value. Zesty.ai digitally transforms the world’s understanding of real estate by using artificial intelligence to build best-in-class predictive models that deliver risk and value insights at the individual property level.”
This latest funding will help Zesty.ai expand the scope of its products, scale go-to-market plans and build new solutions aimed at solving mortgage, property and asset management problems.
