Public Announcement
Contact: Elizabeth Pearce
Vice President, Business Development
Elizabeth@Project-Athena.com
415-595-4784
February 15, 2023
For Immediate Release
Sacramento, CA – February 15, 2023 – Athena Intelligence, an emerging player in the InsurTech arena, proudly announces a significant breakthrough with the launch of its revolutionary geospatial artificial intelligence/machine learning tool for assessing wildfire risk. This groundbreaking solution provides property insurers with an accurate and quantitative measure of the risk for a property being within the footprint of a wildfire, projecting a full year in advance across four key Western states. The software delivers a precise probability of loss for every structure in California, Colorado, Arizona, and Washington.
Athena Intelligence has leveraged both cutting-edge technology and over a dozen years of expertise in geospatial information, agriculture, and strategic business decision-making. The visionary founder of Athena, David Sypnieski, pioneered innovative geospatial solutions to address complex challenges in logistics, yield optimization, water efficiency, specialty crop contracting, and the pursuit of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) goals. Drawing from this extensive experience, Athena Intelligence approaches the analysis of wildfires and terrain from a fresh perspective – examining how the land's conditions can provide crucial insights into the probabilities of fire, irrespective of the location's historical context.
Key Features of Athena Intelligence's Wildfire Risk Assessment Tool:
The ESRI Startup Program, known for fostering innovation in GIS technology, welcomes Athena Intelligence as a promising addition to its network of forward-thinking companies. This collaboration not only highlights Athena Intelligence's potential for growth but also positions the company at the forefront of advancements in prefire planning for wildfire prevention.
Revolutionary Technology: Leveraging advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, Athena Intelligence introduces a cutting-edge tool designed to redefine how the property insurance industry assesses wildfire risk.
Conditional & Geospatial Analysis: The software conducts a conditional, geospatial analysis, providing insurers with unparalleled insights into the specific risks associated with each property, enabling more informed underwriting and wildfire risk optimization decisions.
Year-Ahead Predictive Modeling: Athena Intelligence's tool goes beyond current industry standards, which describe and index risk factors, by creating computable profiles which project wildfire risks a full year in advance, empowering insurers with extended planning horizons for risk mitigation and policy management.
Loss Cost Analysis: By providing a probabilistic, address-based risk assessment, insurers can reserve for losses from wildfires with greater accuracy, improving insurance profitability, renewal decision making and risk portfolio management.
Four-State Coverage: At the launch of the MVP, California, Colorado, Arizona, and Washington are comprehensively addressed, ensuring a broad and inclusive approach to risk assessment.
These groundbreaking features are based on Athena Intelligence's Voice of the Acre® patent-pending technology. This innovative approach to wildfire risk evaluates various factors, including vegetation type, topography, historical fire patterns, and numerous other components, expressing them in dozens of derivatives and indexes. The result is an unparalleled depth of insight into wildfire risks, providing insurers with a nuanced understanding of the drivers specific to each property within a several-mile radius.
Athena Intelligence's commitment to redefining industry standards is further underscored by the comprehensive nature of this tool. By addressing the specific challenges of each bioregion within California, Colorado, Arizona, and Washington at the MVP launch, the platform ensures a broad and inclusive approach to wildfire risk assessment. As insurers embrace this cutting-edge technology, they gain a powerful resource to navigate the complexities of wildfire risk, ultimately empowering them to make informed decisions, optimize underwriting processes, and proactively manage risks with an extended planning horizon.
With the assistance of Zasmic Inc., a distinguished San Francisco-based software development group renowned for serving as an on-demand development team for startups, Athena's online portal is primed for deployment by the property insurance industry. Zasmic's team of specialists, known for their expertise in assisting companies with the successful implementation of productizing cutting-edge and innovative technologies, played a pivotal role in refining the user interface and overall experience of Athena's MVP. This effort ensures that the property insurance industry now has access to an advanced tool that not only leverages state-of-the-art technology but also prioritizes a user-friendly interface, empowering users to navigate and harness the power of Athena's probabilistic wildfire risk projections effortlessly.
David Sypnieski, CEO and founder of Athena Intelligence expressed excitement about the potential impact of the MVP on the property insurance landscape: "We are thrilled to unveil a product that not only addresses the current gaps in wildfire risk assessment but also sets a new benchmark for precision and user experience. Voice of the Acre® is an innovative tool for property and portfolio risk analysis that will redefine industry standards. It offers insurance brokers, MGAs, fronting carriers, and reinsurers tools to navigate the complexities of wildfire risk. With accurate loss cost analysis, our AI-driven solution not only provides insurers with better underwriting decision criteria, but more accurate reserving information. A quantitative measure of wildfire risk is a game-changer for the property insurance industry."
About Athena Intelligence
Athena Intelligence, headquartered in Sacramento, is a data vendor with a proprietary, geospatial, conditional profiling tool that integrates vast amounts of disaggregated wildfire and environmental data. This tool generates spatial intelligence, providing a digital fingerprint of wildfire risk. The company's innovative solutions empower industries such as power, insurance, and financial services to make informed decisions in risk assessment, portfolio optimization, and loss cost probabilities. Learn more at https://AthenaIntel.io.
About Zazmic Inc
Zazmic Inc. is a global software company and Google Cloud Partner with more than 200 employees, providing powerful solutions for all phases of the product development lifecycle. Core services include custom software for Data Science (ML, AI), and web-based companies. Zazmic is an industry leader in assisting startups with product execution. For more information, visit https://www.zazmic.com/