Exclusive: Stand raises $70 million at $1 billion valuation to price wildfire risk by treating homes like airplanes in flight

Matt DiStefano shares his screen and rotates a gray 3D model of a California neighborhood.

He zooms in on one house and overlays a heat map.

Red contours run along the sides and back, where trees stand close to the home.

Blue sits near the pool.

Then he starts deleting trees.

Removing one takes more than $1,100 a year off the home’s premium.

Another, he says, “doesn’t contribute as much.” “This one’s the one that matters,” DiStefano says of the first tree.

He is Stand’s 29-year-old chief science officer and he’s demoing, via screen share, Stand’s proprietary digital twin technology that hopes to solve the insurance industry’s multibillion-dollar problem.

The San Francisco home insurer is announcing today a $70 million Series C raise at a $1 billion valuation, Fortune can exclusively reveal.

Its argument is that insurers have been pricing wildfire risk the wrong way, by looking backward at statistics and sorting homes by zip code.

Stand says the better approach is to simulate each house and show the owner what to fix.

Saga Ventures led the round, with participation from Lowercarbon, Eclipse, Equal Ventures, Inspired Capital, Neotribe, and Jackson Square Ventures, among others.

Stand says it now insures more than $10 billion of property, up from $1 billion a year ago.

CEO Dan Preston says the business is growing about 15% a month, and that it has done so in only two states: in California for wildfire and in Florida for hurricanes.