Securing Your Sanctuary: Revolutionizing Home Insurance with Faura.us CEO, Valkyrie Holmes (1 of 2)
Published Date: 05/07/2024
Securing Your Sanctuary: How Faura.us Is Using Technology to Revolutionize Home Insurance and Disaster Resilience
In an age of increasing natural disasters—wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and extreme storms—homeowners are facing a sobering reality: the places we call home are more vulnerable than ever. Meanwhile, the insurance industry is struggling to adapt to this new era of risk. Carriers are leaving high-risk states, premiums are skyrocketing, and consumers are being left with fewer options and higher costs.
But what if technology could bridge that gap?
Enter Valkyrie Holmes, co-founder and CEO of Faura.us, a climate risk and property analytics startup aiming to reinvent how homeowners and insurers understand, measure, and mitigate natural disaster risk. In a recent conversation with Karl Susman on Insurance Hour, Holmes explained how her platform is helping insurers make smarter underwriting decisions while empowering homeowners to take control of their property’s resilience.
Her company’s approach is refreshingly simple—and potentially game-changing: use data, AI, and homeowner engagement to align everyone’s interests around risk reduction.
The Vision: Aligning Stakeholders for Safer Homes
Holmes didn’t start her career in insurance. With a background in data science and space technology, she spent years working with satellite data before shifting into sustainability research. That transition gave her a crucial insight: climate resilience isn’t just a government or environmental problem—it’s a data problem, and a coordination problem.
“There are so many stakeholders involved in disaster risk—homeowners, insurers, real estate agents, policymakers,” she explained. “The only way to truly reduce losses is to align them all with a shared understanding of the risks and the tools to act.”
That mission led to the creation of Faura.us (pronounced Fora), a digital platform that uses climate and property analytics to help homeowners and insurers assess structural vulnerabilities—then take action to strengthen them.
From the consumer side, Faura offers a free, interactive web tool that lets homeowners evaluate how their property might fare in the face of wildfire, hurricane, or windstorm. From the industry side, it offers data-backed insights that carriers can use to make more accurate underwriting decisions, reduce losses, and even create new pathways for insuring homes once considered too risky.
The Consumer Experience: Turning Risk Into Action
At its heart, Faura’s technology is designed to empower everyday homeowners. Through the Faura.us web platform, users can conduct a self-guided property risk assessment—no downloads or special software required.
Here’s how it works:
- The user enters their name and property address to start the process.
- The platform then walks them through a series of questions about their home’s structure—roof, siding, vegetation, and foundation.
- Using their smartphone or tablet, the homeowner takes photos and short videos of key areas around the home, guided by prompts.
- The system uses a combination of AI analysis and human verification to interpret those images, assign a resilience score, and generate a custom report with actionable recommendations.
That report includes both quantitative data—a risk score—and qualitative advice such as trimming vegetation, clearing gutters, or sealing vents to prevent ember intrusion.
The goal isn’t just to tell homeowners that their property is vulnerable; it’s to give them a clear, step-by-step roadmap to reduce that risk.
“We don’t want to just identify the problem,” Holmes said. “We want to help people actually fix it.”
From Data to Decision-Making: How Insurers Use Faura
While Faura’s consumer tool is educational, its real power emerges on the industry side. Insurance companies and agencies are increasingly using the platform to enhance underwriting accuracy and streamline property inspections.
Traditionally, insurers rely on aerial and satellite imagery—like Google Earth or proprietary mapping tools—to assess risk. But those methods have serious limitations. They can’t see under rooflines, behind structures, or into backyards, where many vulnerabilities hide. Worse, those images may be months or years out of date.
Faura’s approach is more precise. By leveraging fresh, ground-level imagery directly from homeowners, insurers gain a richer and more current understanding of the property’s condition.
Insurers are using Faura in two main ways:
- Underwriting Validation – When a property falls into a “gray area,” carriers can send the homeowner a digital Faura assessment instead of dispatching a physical inspector. The completed report provides visual confirmation of the property’s condition, allowing underwriters to make faster, more confident decisions.
- Discount and Incentive Programs – Some carriers are using Faura data to reward proactive homeowners. By verifying mitigation actions—like clearing defensible space or replacing a wood shake roof—insurers can justify premium discounts or preferred coverage terms.
Holmes mentioned that one of Faura’s early adopters is Hawaiian Hurricane Group, an insurer seeking to better understand wind and storm resilience following devastating tropical events. As she put it, “They’re using our tool to balance safety, affordability, and access to insurance in a market that’s historically been difficult to serve.”
Beyond Wildfire: Expanding to Other Perils
Currently, Faura’s core tools focus on wildfire and wind-related risks, such as hurricanes and tornadoes. But the roadmap is expanding.
“The next product we’re developing is for flood risk,” Holmes revealed. “As we move into the East Coast and Gulf regions, flood becomes a much more relevant peril.”
Flood assessments will complement the existing tools, offering a full spectrum of climate risk analysis. Over time, Faura aims to create a holistic resilience profile for every property in the U.S.—a sort of “climate fitness score” that can help insurers, agents, and homeowners make smarter decisions.
Privacy and Data Security: Building Trust Through Transparency
One of the biggest concerns for homeowners is data privacy—and Holmes was quick to address it.
“Privacy was one of the first things we designed for,” she emphasized. “Homeowners own their data. We don’t sell it to third parties. If they’re working with an insurance company or agent, only those parties—and us—can see it.”
If a homeowner uses Faura’s tools independently, their data is not stored or shared at all; it’s processed locally to generate the report, and then deleted unless they choose to save it.
For enterprise clients (like insurers or real estate firms), data is securely stored in company-specific accounts with access controls and encryption protocols. This ensures compliance with both privacy laws and industry best practices.
The platform also includes geofencing to verify that images are actually taken at the stated address—preventing misuse or fraud. If photos don’t align with the property’s GPS data, the system flags them for manual review.
Improving the Homeowner–Insurer Relationship
One of the most promising aspects of Faura’s approach is how it bridges the communication gap between homeowners and insurers.
Home inspections—especially those required for underwriting—have long been a source of tension. Homeowners often complain about inspectors showing up unannounced or taking invasive photos. Insurers, meanwhile, struggle with incomplete or outdated data.
Faura’s digital self-inspection process solves both problems. It gives homeowners control over when and how inspections happen while giving insurers faster, richer information—all with less friction.
“It’s about improving the customer experience,” Holmes said. “Inspections don’t have to be stressful. They can be collaborative, transparent, and even educational.”
This shift is part of a broader trend across insurance toward personalization and customer empowerment. Just as telematics transformed auto insurance by rewarding safe driving, Faura is helping property insurance move toward a world where proactive homeowners are rewarded for reducing their own risk.
The Bigger Picture: Modernizing Risk Assessment
Karl Susman summed it up perfectly during the interview:
“For years, we’ve been treating whole ZIP codes as uninsurable, when in reality, some homes are far better prepared than others. Technology like this can finally give us that nuance.”
Indeed, this granularity is exactly what insurers need in a time of market upheaval. California, in particular, has seen major carriers pause or withdraw from writing new homeowner policies due to wildfire risk and regulatory restrictions. By allowing insurers to see property-level mitigation data, Faura’s technology could help reopen access to coverage for homeowners currently stranded on the state’s FAIR Plan.
Holmes agrees:
“The more we can personalize and verify risk reduction, the more insurable the state becomes. It’s not about denying coverage—it’s about enabling it responsibly.”
Looking Ahead: A More Resilient Future
The ultimate vision for Faura is not just better insurance underwriting—it’s safer, stronger communities.
Through pilot programs involving thousands of homes, Holmes and her team have already seen tangible results: improved homeowner awareness, faster insurer response times, and measurable reductions in property vulnerabilities.
And as automation advances, Faura plans to integrate real-time data from IoT devices, drones, and environmental sensors, making risk assessment even more dynamic and predictive.
“Disasters aren’t going away,” Holmes said. “But if we can empower people to understand and mitigate their own risk, we can prevent many losses before they happen.”
Final Thoughts
The insurance industry is often criticized for being slow to innovate. But leaders like Valkyrie Holmes are proving that meaningful change is not only possible—it’s already happening.
By merging data science, environmental stewardship, and consumer empowerment, Faura.us represents a new model for how insurance can work with people instead of merely for them.
As Susman noted, “Any tool that helps both insurers and consumers win at the same time is worth paying attention to.”
If technology can help homeowners secure their sanctuaries while keeping insurers solvent and engaged, it may just be the future of resilience itself.
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