We met Kettle Co-Founder Nat Manning a decade ago when he was running geo data platform Ushahidi in Kenya, and later worked with Nat when he went to the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, working with groups like USAID and FEMA as Hurricane Sandy battered the Southern US coast. Nat has always been a mission driven technologist aiming to solve big, intractable global problems, so when he partnered with insurance veteran Andrew Engler to form Kettle Re we knew we wanted to back them as they aimed to apply deep learning to better model risk.
Kettle uses data from roughly 50 sources including NOAA weather data, NASA MODIS and LIDAR satellites and leverages neural networks to better calculate the probabilities that a wildfire will hit a particular area. The world has seen its fair share of catastrophic events, but ingestion of public and private data coupled with the latest in deep learning technology make it such that risk should be better understood, predicted, and structured. Kettle reinsurance is doing just that, now backed with $4.7 million of seed capital from Two Culture Capital, True Ventures, Homebrew, Anthemis, Acrew Capital, and Inspired Ventures. Kettle is leveraging the best of human and machine to solve some of the 21st century’s most salient problems.