Today we are announcing a new name, a new product, Series A funding, and the next phase of our climate adaptation mission.
Cloud to Street is now Floodbase. Over the last ten years, our company has evolved from grad school research to an end-to-end data solution for insurers to underwrite parametric flood insurance anywhere on Earth.
Today, we’re launching a new parametric insurance solution that enables insurers to protect against all hurricane damage—wind and flood. This hurricane solution is powered by our newest technology, which fuses our global earth observation-based flood data with hydrologic, methodological, and environmental data to map floods every hour.
We believe parametric flood insurance is a critical tool for transferring climate risk and helping businesses, communities, and governments adapt to climate change. Backed by Lowercarbon Capital and Collaborative Fund, we will use our Series A funding to build our team, scale our product, and exponentially grow the parametric flood insurance market.
Making parametric flood insurance possible
Floods are the most common and costly natural peril on Earth.
- Hurricane Ian was the third-costliest hurricane in history, with damages totalling $112.9 billion
- Australia’s 2022 floods cost $3.5 billion
- Pakistan’s 2022 floods are expected to exceed $10 billion and killed over 1,000 people
- Nigeria’s 2022 floods affected 2 million people, damaged 200,000 homes, and killed over 600 people
Despite this growing exposure, most flood losses are uninsured. Swiss Re estimates ⅔ of the US is uninsured and 83% of global economic losses from flooding were uninsured in the last decade.
The challenge has been lack of data and lack of delivery.
Floodbase provides insurers an end-to-end flood data solution for parametric insurance. From index design and pricing to triggering payouts, we enable insurers to protect and transfer previously uninsurable risk.
We already work with the world’s largest brokers, insurers, and reinsurers to underwrite flood insurance policies for corporate and sovereign risk, and portfolios of individuals.
Today we’re taking that one step further with a new solution for hurricane coverage in the US.
Supplementing parametric wind cover with added flood protection
As hurricanes become wetter, slower and stronger, flooding is becoming a greater element of exposure. Hurricane Harvey, for example, dumped over 60 inches of rain on Houston, totalling $125 billion in damages.
Our newest hurricane solution enables insurers to now fully protect parametric policyholders from both the wind and flooding elements of tropical cyclones.
We can now detect flooding before, during, and after hurricanes, by mapping floods every hour at any scale regardless of the weather. This allows insurers to develop parametric solutions that can trigger and provide coverage for both wind and flood damage.
You can learn more about adding flood protection to your hurricane parametric policies here.
What’s next
We believe adapting to climate change requires better data. We are building the most comprehensive and actionable flood database on the market, and aim to create new types of insurance tools and eventually other financial products that can provide a baseline of financial security for every person and business around the globe.
We’re proud to work with Lowercarbon, Collaborative Fund, and our other investors to make this vision a reality.
If you’d like to learn how you can work with our flood data, contact our sales team or send us a note to hello@floodbase.com.
