Verizon Local weather Resilience Prize Winner Highlight: Raincoat

Verizon launched the Local weather Resilience Prize in 2021 to help corporations utilizing superior know-how to create options that tackle climate-related impacts to susceptible communities. Now, in its second 12 months, the 4 successful corporations, chosen by Verizon, have demonstrated confirmed outcomes with their new approaches and are able to scale. One of many 2023 winners is a Puerto Rican-based firm, Raincoat, which supplies information analytics that undergird “parametric insurance coverage” to shield people from the monetary disruption of pure disasters. 

Raincoat leaders launched their firm after experiencing the difficult aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The expertise gave them deep insights into the multi-layered points confronting private and non-private sectors in defending and responding to pure disasters, together with the assets, specialists and monetary help wanted to assist people get better.  In response, Raincoat helps parametric insurance coverage methods with its workforce of engineers, scientists, person expertise designers, and insurance coverage specialists. 

Harnessing the ability of real-time information, Raincoat’s subtle fashions interpret complicated environmental information to assist develop strong and dependable insurance coverage options to those that might be impacted by a extreme climate occasion. By collaborating with insurers, monetary establishments, nonprofits, and governments, Raincoat helps insurance coverage methods designed to beat the lengthy ready intervals they may have skilled after a extreme local weather occasion.

Picture courtesy of Raincoat

In contrast to conventional insurance coverage, which includes a prolonged claims adjustment course of, parametric insurance coverage routinely pays an insured celebration a set quantity based mostly on the scale of the occasion (e.g., a hurricane of a sure magnitude). Raincoat’s fashions and algorithms use public information to assist calibrate payouts based mostly on the scale of catastrophic occasions. For instance, for the latest hurricane Otis in Mexico, claims had been paid inside 24 hours of landfall. Along with overlaying property losses, Raincoat’s options cowl non-property associated monetary losses, reminiscent of lack of revenue.

Picture courtesy of Raincoat

With the cash obtained from the Verizon Local weather Resilience Prize, Raincoat is seeking to deploy its resolution in closely affected hurricane and flooding areas, reminiscent of New Orleans, Florida, and New York. 

Along with being named as a 2023 winner of the Verizon Local weather Resilience Prize, Raincoat was not too long ago named to Quick Firm’s listing of “World Altering Concepts 2023.”

About The Local weather Resilience Prize:

The Local weather Resilience Prize, which launched in 2021, is a part of Citizen Verizon, the corporate’s accountable marketing strategy for financial, environmental, and social development. To be taught extra about Verizon’s ongoing efforts to help communities in want, please go to  CitizenVerizon.com.

This text is sponsored by Verizon.