RockRose Risk started after hearing property owners complain about spending money on mitigation to make properties safer, but not seeing a change in the cost of their insurance premium.
"If a property owner is willing to invest in actually reducing the probability or severity of a
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How did you come into your leadership position?
I started right out of college at a small Allstate agency and helped grow it into the second-largest agency in California over a couple of years. After that, I took over as the lead of Commercial Insurance in Arizona for Allstate. Then I joined Argo Group as the founder and head of the Digital and Machine Learning division. We grew it to $120 million in revenue over a five-year period, during which I gained experience across casualty, property, and reinsurance while living in Bermuda for three years.
I founded my first company, Kettle, in 2020, which is a wildfire parametric insurer on the West Coast. I subsequently founded Airlast, a commercial HVAC service and guarantee business. My current venture, RockRose Risk, was founded in 2024 and is focused on commercial and residential property insurance in wildfire and severe convective storm-exposed states.
What advice would you give to other insurtech leaders, or to yourself 5 years ago?:
Insurance is ultimately a business built on trust, capital and underwriting results, so technology should make those fundamentals better, not distract from them. Build something that works in the real insurance market, not just something that looks good in a product demo.
How do you see AI changing insurance over the next 5 years?:
At this point, I think AI has become extremely overblown in its promise versus delivery. I see massive implications in actual functional hardware efficiency in mitigation and in reducing transactional friction. But optical character recognition and machine learning have been around since the 1950s, and we've already seen automation in the binding of auto and home insurance.
The actual change comes from physically manipulating risk, not just finding creative new ways to reprice a risk that should be fundamentally lowered.
What is the biggest opportunity for insurtechs over the next 6 months?:
The biggest opportunities are in the ability to blend business models. For us, traditionally, it would be very hard to acquire and embed a roofing or tree-trimming company and manage both the retail brokerage operation and a services business.
Today, 80% of the brokerage function is automated and essentially consists of algorithmic action chains. Similarly, we can run a service business like a tree-trimming company remotely, with robotic assessment, team management and deployment and all ancillary functions like billing, marketing, payroll, etc., being taken care of.
What is the biggest mistake insurtechs make these days?:
Not respecting the history of the market. It's scary to see some new entrants making mistakes that would have been nearly identical to issues you'd have seen during previous liability crises or other market-shifting events.
Insurance has a long memory, and many of the challenges companies are trying to solve today have existed in different forms for decades. The lesson is that technology does not eliminate underwriting cycles, adverse selection, claims risk or the importance of disciplined pricing. Insurtechs should study what has worked and failed before and build around those lessons rather than assuming a new technology makes the underlying insurance mechanics obsolete.
What is the company's name, and does it have any meaning?:
RockRose Risk. We named it that because, in the 1960s, the Girl Scouts of America gave the city of Pasadena, my hometown, batches of rockrose flowers to plant along the hillsides because they are a fire-retardant plant.
What pain points is the technology trying to solve?:
I think the entire brokerage model is ripe for change. The true function of that position should be as a vertically integrated risk manager for property. Our clients should have one place to go to have their property made safer from catastrophic events. That includes an entire bundle of assessment, physical work to de-risk the property like tree and brush removal, ongoing mitigation and then discounted insurance for true rare events.
What funding rounds has the company had?:
We've had pre-seed and seed funding totaling $9 million, and most recently, we announced our $12.5 million Series A.
What's ahead?:
We've seen explosive growth in California, Nevada, and Colorado and are continually expanding in these areas, along with the launch of our new homeowners product. We also will be expanding into the Northeast severe convective storm (SCS) peril, where we see significant issues beginning with tree mortality and roof repair/replacement arbitrage that are hurting the industry. SCS is becoming an increasingly important property insurance challenge.
RockRose plans to expand to more states and territories while continuing to enhance the platform and its services, with the goal of bringing the mitigation-first model to more property owners. The broader opportunity is to apply the same approach across different catastrophic perils.
How many employees does your company have?:
12
Where is the company based?:
California and New York
