I spent years inside the wildfire insurance crisis. Then I built the tool I wished existed.

The inside view

As Head of Product at Terrafuse AI, I helped build two enterprise wildfire risk models that are now used by insurers and reinsurers to make coverage decisions. I spent years learning the science, and I spent a lot of time (over 70 research interviews) talking to insurance executives, underwriters, and risk managers about how they think about wildfire exposure.

That work gave me an unusually clear view of why California's insurance market is collapsing: insurers have access to increasingly sophisticated risk data, and they're using it. Homeowners, by and large, don't have the same picture, and they're paying the price without understanding why.

Why Fortify

The information gap is the problem. Insurers are pulling out of entire zip codes based on risk scores that homeowners have never seen. Families are losing coverage, or facing premiums that have doubled or tripled, without any real explanation of what's driving it or what they could do about it.

Fortify exists to close that gap. We aggregate the same data types that underwriters use: state fire hazard severity zones, vegetation exposure, and historical fire perimeters, and translate it into something a homeowner can actually use to understand their situation, ask better questions, and take action.

Background

I started in mechanical engineering at Marquette, went to Stanford for environmental engineering (and through the Stanford Ignite entrepreneurship program), and ended up building software products. The thread is that I like hard problems in domains where the stakes are real.