Stand reached a $1 billion valuation on October 15, 2026 after closing a $70 million Series C led by Saga Ventures — a round that landed as the climate-risk home insurer's covered property jumped from $1 billion to more than $10 billion in a single year.
Stand insures homes in wildfire- and hurricane-exposed markets that many traditional carriers have been retreating from, using a digital model of each property rather than a zip-code average to price risk, according to Fortune's exclusive report on the round.
Stand's Funding History: From a $30M Round to a $1B Valuation in Two Years
Stand's valuation jump tracks a steep climb in how much property it actually insures, not just a new funding round on its own. The company disclosed an earlier round in December 2024, then a Series B in October 2025, before closing its Series C in October 2026.
| Event | Date | Amount | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early funding round | Dec 2024 | $30M | Inspired Capital, Lowercarbon, Equal Ventures, Convective Capital |
| Series B | Oct 2025 | $35M | Led by Eclipse ($30M of the round) |
| Insured property (at Series B) | Oct 2025 | ~$1B | First market: wildfire-exposed California |
| Series C | Oct 15, 2026 | $70M | Led by Saga Ventures, at a $1B valuation |
| Insured property (at Series C) | Oct 15, 2026 | $10B+ | Now across California and Florida |
| Total funding to date | Oct 15, 2026 | $130M | Across all disclosed rounds |
Sources: Pulse 2.0 on the December 2024 round; Fintech Global on the October 2025 Series B; Fortune on the October 2026 Series C. How we counted: Stand's own disclosed funding rounds and insured-property figures as reported through October 18, 2026; 3 rounds.
Who Led Stand's Series C, and Who Else Invested?
Saga Ventures led the $70 million round, with Lowercarbon, Eclipse, Equal Ventures, Inspired Capital, Neotribe, and Jackson Square Ventures also participating, per Fortune. Eclipse, Lowercarbon, Inspired Capital, and Equal Ventures are all repeat backers: Eclipse led the $35 million Series B in October 2025, and Lowercarbon and Inspired Capital had already invested in the December 2024 round, alongside Equal Ventures and Convective Capital.
How Does Stand's Underwriting Model Actually Work?
Stand builds what it calls a "World Model" for each insured home — a digital representation of the structure, materials, surrounding vegetation, and local weather patterns, run through computational fluid dynamics to simulate how a specific wildfire or windstorm would affect that specific property, rather than pricing risk off a zip-code average the way traditional carriers do, per Fortune's reporting. Homeowners who complete Stand's recommended resilience upgrades, such as clearing brush or replacing flammable materials, can qualify for premium discounts of up to 70%.
Policies are issued through Stand's own carriers — Concert Specialty Insurance Company (rated A- by AM Best) in California and Stand Insurance Exchange (rated A by Demotech) in Florida — and reinsured by Arch, RenaissanceRe, Hannover, Nephila, and Hiscox. In an internal, Fortune-unverified backtest of about 310 California homes affected by wildfires, including homes in the Palisades Fire, Stand said its model correctly predicted whether a home would burn or survive roughly 85% of the time, versus 50-55% for competing location-based models.
Why Stand Is Betting on Markets Other Insurers Are Leaving
Stand's pitch rests on a gap left by incumbent carriers: traditional insurers price wildfire and hurricane risk using historical statistics and zip-code-level groupings, which Stand co-founder and chief science officer Matt DiStefano describes as a credit score a homeowner has no way to improve, per Fortune's reporting. California and Florida have both seen large insurers pull back from writing new policies in catastrophe-exposed areas in recent years, and Stand argues that gap is big enough, and underpriced enough, for a tech-enabled carrier willing to underwrite the risk directly rather than sell scoring software to reluctant incumbents.
That underwriting-first approach distinguishes Stand from climate-risk data vendors that sell risk scores to existing insurers without taking on the policies themselves. It also means Stand's own loss ratios, not just the accuracy of its World Model, are the number that will determine whether the approach works once a major wildfire or hurricane season tests its book at its current $10 billion-plus scale.
What's Next: Stand's Expansion Plans
Stand plans to expand across the wildfire-prone western U.S. and into the hurricane-exposed Southeast beyond its current California and Florida footprint, then eventually into severe convective storms, winter freezes, and flooding, according to Fortune. CEO Dan Preston has also floated potential future products that are not yet in the near-term pipeline: financing resilience upgrades over the life of a policy, letting real estate firms pre-underwrite their inventory before a sale, and transferring a policy to a home's next buyer rather than requiring them to requalify from scratch.
Team-wise, Stand runs lean relative to its $10 billion-plus book: about 10 people work in product and engineering and another 10 in applied science, per Fortune's reporting, a headcount the company will likely need to grow as it expands into new states and new catastrophe types.
What the headline misses
Stand's headline accuracy claim — correctly predicting wildfire outcomes about 85% of the time versus a 50-55% baseline — comes from the company's own backtest and has not been independently verified by Fortune or any outside party. A $1 billion valuation on $130 million raised also says nothing yet about loss ratios: Stand has not disclosed how its policies actually paid out through a real wildfire or hurricane season at its current $10 billion-plus scale, which is the number that will determine whether its underwriting model holds up once claims, not simulations, are the test.
Bottom line: Stand is valued at $1 billion as of October 15, 2026, after a $70 million Series C led by Saga Ventures, with total funding reaching $130 million across three disclosed rounds since December 2024. The company's insured property grew roughly tenfold in a year, to more than $10 billion across California and Florida — the metric CEO Dan Preston says justifies the new valuation more than the round size alone.
Track newly tracked private-company valuations on Unicorns and every round as it's added on the funding tracker.
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