The Story of Future Proof: Building the Future of Climate Risk Insurance
Great companies often start with founders trying to solve problems that personally frustrate them. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Alisa Valderrama shared how Future Proof Technologies began with a simple question: why couldn’t she surf after it rained in San Diego?
A Surfer’s Environmental Awakening
Growing up in San Diego, Alisa found herself puzzled by a peculiar contradiction. In a modern, developed city, polluted runoff would make the ocean unsafe for 72 hours after each rainfall. “I was literally… just frustrated that sometimes when the waves were good, you couldn’t get in the water because the water was polluted,” she recalls.
This observation led to deeper questions about environmental economics. As Alisa explains, “While the cost to build these infrastructure and treatment facilities was calculable and knowable, the cost of polluting the water was never even calculated. It’s considered an externality, not part of any fundamental financial calculations.”
From Law School to Environmental Finance
Believing that better regulations might solve the problem, Alisa went to law school to study securities law and corporate governance. But upon graduation, she found that “there was really no job for me to take doing innovative legal work at the intersection of climate risk and finance, unless I really wanted to be an academic.”
Instead, she spent over a decade in project finance, helping cities fund energy efficiency retrofits and urban flood management solutions. Yet a fundamental question persisted: “How would one go about translating environmental cost into financial cost, translating climate risk into financial risk?”
The Pivot to Insurance Innovation
The breakthrough came when Future Proof realized they had built something more valuable than initially intended. While the financial industry wasn’t ready for sophisticated climate risk analytics, the insurance sector desperately needed better risk assessment tools.
Rather than selling analytics, Future Proof transformed into a Managing General Agency (MGA), using their AI-driven model to help insurance companies better understand and price climate risk. As Alisa notes, “We are not selling analytics into the market. We’re not selling a catastrophe model. We are using our own unique model to select and price risk on behalf of insurers and reinsurers.”
Building Trust Through Validation
A crucial milestone came when one of the world’s largest reinsurance brokers validated their model through extensive testing on 270,000 Florida addresses. This third-party validation proved that their technology could significantly improve risk assessment for real-world hurricane events.
The Vision Ahead
Looking to the future, Future Proof aims to fundamentally transform how insurance approaches climate risk. Alisa envisions that “In five years we’re in all 50 states with homeowners commercial insurance as well. We have differentiated insurance policies… and crucially, the Future Proof insurance policies have financial incentives for investments in resiliency built in.”
But the company’s ambitions extend beyond just better insurance products. As Alisa explains, “Insofar as insurance is really the grease on the wheels of global finance and commerce… it’s never going to take effect without insurance evolving and getting fixed first.”
From a surfer’s frustration with pollution to building a company that could reshape how we assess and manage climate risk, Future Proof’s journey shows how personal passion can evolve into transformative innovation. As Alisa reflects, “We’re in the right place at the right time… we’re working on one of the biggest and most high impact ideas I can think of when it comes to climate change.”