Exclusive: Stand raises $70 million at $1 billion valuation to price wildfire risk in a new way

Stand is betting that wildfire insurance has been looking at the wrong thing all along. The San Francisco startup says it can build a digital twin of a house, simulate fire or a tropical cyclone, and show what specific changes would alter the premium. In one demo, deleting a single tree cut more than $1,100 a year off a home’s price.

That pitch just pulled in $70 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation, Fortune can exclusively reveal. Saga Ventures led the round, with Lowercarbon, Eclipse, Equal Ventures, Inspired Capital, Neotribe and Jackson Square Ventures among the backers. Stand says it now insures more than $10 billion of property, up from $1 billion a year ago, and that business has been growing about 15% a month while operating only in California and Florida.

CEO Dan Preston and chief science officer Matt DiStefano argue the industry’s old method is basically a blunt score tied to location. Their complaint is simple: two homes on the same block can face very different fire risk, but a zip-code model often treats them as equals. Stand says its system looks at the house itself, the materials, the trees, the brush, wind direction and weather conditions. It also says its in-house Stand World Model can run physics-based simulations instantly.

The company is not shy about claiming better results. DiStefano said Stand tested its model on roughly 310 California homes that burned or survived wildfires over the past three to four years, including homes affected by the Palisades Fire, and says it predicted the outcome about 85% of the time. He compared that with industry models that he said landed at 50% to 55%. Fortune could not independently verify the figures, but the broader strategy is clear: make insurance feel less like a fixed fate and more like something homeowners can actually change.

Stand plans to expand across the wildfire-prone West and the Southeast, then into areas hit by severe convective storms, freezes and flooding. It also added Drew Saad as president of property and casualty and Tony Landi as CFO. The company is trying to turn insurance into a product where mitigation matters. That is a much better story than “your ZIP code says no.”