Alisa Valderrama, Co-founder and CEO of FutureProof Technologies: $10 Million Raised to Translate Climate and Weather and Financial Risk with Unprecedented Accuracy

In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Alisa Valderrama, Co-founder and CEO of FutureProof Technologies, an insuretech startup that’s raised nearly $10 Million in funding, about why their innovative approach to calculating climate risk is crucial to solving some of the future’s biggest challenges. Having developed an analytical model facilitating insurance underwriting in areas traditional insurers might give a wide berth, they are finally translating environmental risk into financial risk.

We also speak about how surfing in her hometown of San Diego got Alisa started on the path to green business, why until now finance and the environment have been speaking totally different languages, why financializing environmental damage is key to addressing the problem, and why, even with an ideal solution in hand, securing the right go-to-market strategy was still FutureProof Technologies’ biggest challenge.

Topics Discussed:

• How a local passion for surfing in her hometown of San Diego led Alisa to take on some truly global challenges
• Why traditional insurers struggle to deal with the realities of contemporary climate change risk
• The language barrier between environmental and financial risk, and ho it confounds the idea of truly sustainable business
• How climate solutions are costed, but why an inability to calculate pollution makes resilience hard to justify from an ROI perspective
• Why FutureProof Technology is launching where their need is most acute, targeting the highly vulnerable real estate of Florida’s low-lying coastline
• How finding a go-to-market strategy was a real challenge, even with an innovative analytical model in hand

Favorite book: It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness