OUTRIDER

Flood cover for horticulture, paid on what was measured.

Parametric cover for New Zealand orchards. In development.

No claim to fileSettlement is days, driven by satellite revisit — slower than a rain gauge, materially faster than an assessor walking the block.
21,000 parcelsMeasured across Cyclone Gabrielle from data that already existed, without installing anything on a single block.

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.

Two maps of the same 10 km area of the Heretaunga Plains during Cyclone Gabrielle. On the left every parcel inside the grid cell is shaded a single uniform tone. On the right the same parcels are shaded individually, ranging from untouched to entirely under water, with the flooding following the river and the low ground.
One 10 km grid cell on the Heretaunga Plains during Cyclone Gabrielle. A rainfall trigger assigns a single value across the whole cell. Inside it, some blocks went entirely under water while their neighbours stayed dry.

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. That is what parametric means: the payout follows a measured index rather than an assessed loss. The measurement runs entirely on free, openly licensed satellite and elevation data.

A sensor answers a different question: it measures 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

Measured as at July 2026. What is fixed is the index — the share of the parcel observed under water — and the schedule agreed against it before the season. The model that reads the index is deliberately replaceable: a new one takes over only if it beats the current one on a frozen benchmark without increasing either missed floods or payouts on parcels that stayed dry. So these figures move, the contract does not, and the current record travels with the dossier rather than with this page.

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.

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 cannot reliably see standing water beneath a closed orchard canopy. Physics, not tuning, and it sits on the crop the product is aimed at.

FOR INVESTORS

The category The parametric alternatives offered against this peril have measured rainfall rather than inundation. Rain is a cause; inundation is the effect. Measuring the effect is a different product, not a better model of the same one.
The structure An MGA — a managing general agent, writing policies on another carrier's licence and capital, owning the underwriting decision and the customer, and ceding the risk to that capital.
What compounds Every policy written against a measured index also produces a labelled record: floods measured, and payouts made against them. That record accrues only to whoever holds the policies, and it cannot be bought.

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.

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FOUNDERLuca Harris
BASED INNew Zealand