Delos Insurance Solutions, a catastrophe insurance MGA focused on California wildfire-related risks, raised $5.3 million in seed funding designed to fuel further expansion in the state.

“With this round of financing, Delos can go much further in achieving its dual mission of making reasonably priced insurance available to California homeowners while providing insurers and reinsurers a reliable stream of profitable revenue,” Delos co-founder and CEO Kevin Stein said in prepared remarks.

IA Capital led the round, along with participation from Avanta Ventures, Red Dog Capital, a syndicate of strategic investors led by insurance executive Jonathan Crystal, and Futureland Syndicate.

The funding will help Delos further expand within the California homeowners insurance market, which is struggling with record-breaking wildfire losses. Delos proprietary underwriting technology is designed to help insurance carriers profitably insure homes within areas that incumbents had deemed as high risk for wildfire.

As the company explains, Delos’ underwriting model quantifies wildfire risk under a wide range of actual and hypothetical scenarios, even amid rapidly changing conditions. Using satellite images and other data sources, proprietary machine learning algorithms identify and quantify relationships among factors such as vegetation condition, ignition sources, weather, terrain, and loss mitigation measures.

Delos said it has catastrophe modeling and climate modeling expertise vertically integrated into all levels of the company, allowing it to adapt and react immediately as the wildfire peril evolves. This confluence of machine learning technology, data, and expertise is designed to lead to more dependable data-driven underwriting, pricing, and portfolio management decisions.

While Delos is presently focused on the California homeowners insurance market, the company said its underwriting technology is also applicable to wildfire risk in other states and can be adapted to other catastrophic loss scenarios.

Delos launched in San Francisco in 2017, a startup developed by aerospace engineers. It is a managing general agent offering policies on behalf of Canopius U.S. Insurance.

Delos was the winner of the Angel Investor Prize from the 2021 Early-Stage InsurTech Competition at the incubator’s InsurTech Spring Conference earlier in 2021. The company was also a participant in Carrier Management‘s InsurTech Summit 2021.

Source: Delos Insurance Solutions