Zesty.ai Inc., a startup with a climate risk platform that provides data about wildfires, storms and other severe weather events, has raised $33 million in new financing.

The company announced the investment this morning. It describes the investment as a Series B round that included a mix of equity and debt financing. Growth equity fund Centana Growth Partners led the round, while several returning investors participated as well.

The San Francisco-based startup provides a climate risk platform for the insurance sector. It says its platform uses artificial intelligence to determine whether a property is at risk of being affected by wildfires. Insurers can consult the insights generated by Zesty.ai to inform how they issue insurance policies.

Zesty.ai says that its platform generates insights by drawing on a repository of more than 200 billion data points. The startup’s algorithms analyze aerial imagery of properties, weather reports, sensor measurements and other data. It claims that its approach is more accurate than the traditional risk evaluation methods used in the insurance sector. 

The company makes the insights surfaced by its platform available through a search bar. Using the search bar, workers at an insurance company can quickly find the risk data associated with a specific property. The platform displays a high-level score that indicates how likely it is a property will be affected by wildfires and also provides more granular data points, such as if there are trees nearby. 

“The way the world understands value and risk in real estate is based on outdated inspections and decades-old risk maps,” said Zesty.ai co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Attila Toth. “Zesty.ai digitally transforms the world’s understanding of real estate by using artificial intelligence to build best-in-class predictive models that deliver risk and value insights at the individual property level.”

In addition to analyzing risks related to wildfires, Zesty.ai promises to simplify a number of related tasks.

The startup’s platform enables insurers to access data about flooding, hail storms and other severe weather events. Additionally, an insurer can use the platform to explore past real-estate transactions associated with a property. 

The platform provides access to other data points as well, including the height of a building, the configuration of its roof and the year in which it was built. Using Zesty.ai’s platform, insurers can automatically collect such data when onboarding new customers. That reduces the need for manual work, which the startup says results in a faster customer onboarding process.

Zesty.ai’s platform is gaining significant traction in the insurance sector. According to Zesty.ai, the platform is used by about half of the top 50 property and casualty insurance providers in the U.S. The startup says strong customer demand more than doubled its revenues in the past year, but didn’t share absolute numbers.

The company will use its latest funding round to enhance its platform and develop new risk analysis products for the real-estate market. In parallel, the startup plans to expand go-to-market initiatives.

Image: Zesty.ai