OUTRIDER

Flood cover for horticulture, paid on what was measured.

Parametric cover for New Zealand orchards. In development.

Rain is not flood. A rainfall trigger records what fell over a grid cell far larger than any orchard inside it — not whether that orchard went under water.

Outrider measures the thing being insured: the inundation of the individual land parcel, read from satellite radar that sees through cloud and at night. The unit is the legal parcel, the same unit a policy is written against. No loss adjuster and no negotiation — the flood is measured, the schedule is read, the payment is made. That is what parametric means: the payout follows a measured index rather than an assessed loss.

A sensor answers a different question. It measures the water at one point, and has to be installed on every property it protects. The index measures the whole parcel from data that already exists — which is why the Cyclone Gabrielle validation ran across roughly 21,000 land parcels without installing anything on any of them.

HOW IT SETTLES

01Measure Satellite radar records the share of the insured parcel that went under water.
02Read the schedule The payout schedule is agreed and disclosed before the season, not fitted after the event.
03Pay No adjuster, no proof-of-loss file, nothing to negotiate.

MEASURED INDEX

  1. Satellite measures the parcel
  2. Schedule is read
  3. Payment issued

LOSS-ADJUSTED COVER

  1. Grower reports the loss
  2. Insurer reviews the claim
  3. Adjuster travels to the block and assesses it
  4. Loss is quantified, and negotiated
  5. Payment issued on settlement

EVIDENCE

0.674Correlation against the Hawke's Bay Regional Council's survey-grade flood mapping on Cyclone Gabrielle, across 2,503 verified orchard parcels — with 20% of genuinely flooded orchards missed.
0.931Area under curve — how cleanly flooded ground is separated from dry, where 1.0 is perfect and 0.5 a coin toss — on Storm Boris, Poland 2024, a country the method had never seen, with no tuning, against the European emergency mapping service's independent delineation.
Scatter plot of satellite-measured inundation against regional council survey mapping across 2,503 orchard parcels, correlation 0.674, with the missed region shaded.
Measured against surveyed, Cyclone Gabrielle. The shaded band is our miss — 20.1% of genuinely flooded orchards fell below the payout threshold. The council's mapping was produced independently of our radar measurement, from aerial photography, field inspection and ground contours; it maps extent, not depth, and uses optical satellite imagery among its inputs.

Every parametric product carries basis risk: the chance the index and the actual loss disagree. The question is whether it is measured or merely hoped for. Ours is measured, including where it fails: the radar band in use does not reliably see standing water beneath a closed orchard canopy — physics, not a tuning problem, and it sits on the crop the product is aimed at. The full validation record is in the technical dossier.

WHO THIS IS FOR

Insurers, reinsurers and capacity providers. The technical dossier — method, validation record, out-of-sample results and failure modes — is available on request, and a conversation is usually more useful than a document.

FOUNDERLuca Harris
BASED INNew Zealand