Stand Hits $1 Billion Valuation With $70 Million Series C

By Nathan Brooks

Stand has raised a $70 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, and it did so by pricing wildfire risk the way engineers price risk in an airplane. The San Francisco home insurer, founded about two and a half years ago, says it now insures more than $10 billion of property — a tenfold jump from $1 billion a year ago.

Saga Ventures led the round, with Lowercarbon, Eclipse, Equal Ventures, Inspired Capital, Neotribe and Jackson Square Ventures participating. CEO Dan Preston says the business is growing about 15% a month, operating in only two states so far: California for wildfire and Florida for hurricanes.

What does the model actually do?

Chief science officer Matt DiStefano, 29, demoed the company's proprietary digital twin technology via screen share. He rotated a 3D model of a California neighborhood, zoomed in on one house, and overlaid a heat map. Red contours ran along the sides where trees stand close. Then he started deleting trees — and watched the price move.

Removing one tree took more than $1,100 a year off the home's premium. "This one's the one that matters," DiStefano said of the first tree. Another, he said, "doesn't contribute as much."

His critique of the industry: zip-code-based scoring gives homeowners what amounts to "a credit score you can't change." Insurers can barely tell apart two homes on the same block — a brick bunker next to a wooden shed gets the same rating. The result, he said, is homeowners who spend tens of thousands hardening their houses and still get non-renewed. Stand says it has heard "hundreds of stories" like that from clients.

"We simulate what would happen if an event happened, so if a wildfire occurred or if a tropical cyclone occurred," DiStefano said. "We're not looking at the neighboring home. We're looking at this specific home, the specific materials and the specific arrangement of trees."

The company runs computational fluid dynamics — physics models layered on the digital twins, accounting for structure, trees, brush, wind direction and weather. DiStefano's resume includes stints at Boeing and SpaceX. An in-house frontier AI, the Stand World Model, runs the simulations instantly. He said the team "successfully taught neural networks to actually understand the physics."

How accurate is it?

DiStefano said Stand ran a blind, forward-looking validation against roughly 310 California homes hit by wildfires over the past three to four years, including homes affected by the Palisades Fire. Run with no knowledge of outcomes, the model predicted burn or survival about 85% of the time. Competing industry-standard location-based models, he claimed, got it right 50–55% of the time — "really are a coin flip." The results are Stand's own and have not been independently verified.

The model has rated some homes at a 99.8% chance of being lost in a fire, DiStefano said. Targeted changes recommended by the model brought that close to 15%.

Insurance you can actually change

Preston, 41, previously CEO of pay-per-mile auto insurer Metromile, said the structure follows from the model: Stand actively helps customers redesign their properties. "We literally have somebody on staff who used to be a construction builder," he said. In a statement, he added: "Disasters follow the laws of physics, and insurance should too."

The company sells through brokers — including the country's largest — and co-founder and chief product officer Jason Mueller said one of Stand's "biggest secrets" is making brokers "look like heroes" with near-instant quotes. His product and engineering team of about 10, he said, does "100 times the work" of his last team of 100-plus at Policygenius, thanks to modern AI tooling.

The Series B, led by Eclipse, closed a little more than a year ago. Preston said the company "hit our inflection point" soon after, and the new money mostly backs that growth. Stand plans to expand across the wildfire-prone West and the Southeast, later into regions exposed to severe convective storms, freezes and flooding.

Two hires will run that expansion: Drew Saad, formerly chief underwriting officer at PURE Insurance, joins as president of property and casualty; Tony Landi, formerly of Nephila and Openly, becomes CFO. Policies are issued by Concert Specialty Insurance Company (AM Best A-) in California and Stand Insurance Exchange (Demotech A) in Florida, with reinsurance from Arch, RenaissanceRe, Hannover, Nephila and Hiscox.

For practitioners, the so-what is straightforward: if Stand's physics-first pricing holds up at scale, underwriting shifts from portfolio-level statistics to per-house engineering — and homeowners finally get a lever they can pull.