the end of faura.

I remember the day I knew my company was going to change forever.

It was December 2025 in Williamsburg, New York. I was looking out of the window at an office on the phone with my cofounder, with me holding back tears in front of strangers. We had been in business for 3 years, and it was apparent that we were struggling to land a product that resonated in the market. We still had another 1.5+ years of runway, and were about to launch a new product that solved our previous problems. Other insurtech startups would stop us at conferences or find us on LinkedIn and beg to understand our brand, or how we were getting in the door with the carriers that we were.

That didn’t matter. We were making choices out of fear. Our team was no longer brave intellectuals charging into the night, but transfigured into streaks of anxiety as we burned millions and worked 17 hour days to see growth of our solution. Hallowed out is not a good enough word for the interior demolition I was going through.

I watched my cofounder’s face through the FaceTime window, as she looks into the abyss intently. Then I carefully said, “The team can probably tell we’re freaking out. Another pivot makes us look weak in the market and dilutes our messaging. If we don’t have confidence in what we do, then no one else will. We need to lead from faith in what we bring from one product and one customer, instead of fear that it will not be good enough by targeting multiple products to multiple customers”.

We got off that call, and left for Christmas.

In January, when we came back from holiday break, our board told us we were a failure and should shut down or sell our company. It wasn’t a year since we announced our $3.5 million seed round. I know we never did truly cross the threshold from fear to faith. I think about that conversation often, and wonder if I was talking to myself more than I was talking to her.

You are reading this because Faura is winding down. These seem like simple words to read, but they are hard words to process enough to write. Faura has been 4 years of my life. Every bit of my waking brain. Every core tether to who started as my cofounder, and ended as my best friend: Valkyrie.

Faura winding down was not our main plan. We shopped for acquisition for a bit to no avail. We evaluated a bridge round and a Series A, while the fundraising market kept us humble and on our toes, especially as a climate tech company. But ultimately, we shut down for many reasons. The primary being, in my opinion, the natural disaster resilience market is not mature enough to financially support most of the solutions being incubated.

Self-inspection apps specific to natural disaster mitigation, widely hailed as the future of the industry, are a complete dud when you actually bring them to carriers or to MGAs. They do not want a self-inspection app specific to resilience, they want a general self-inspection tool with resilience capabilities and characteristics. This was a common theme in Faura: pushing resilience and incentivizing mitigation is not enough of a value proposition, as of the current day. It best sits within a general suite of products as additional functionality, but not as a separate software business itself.

This is not to say we did not build a successful product. Our last pilot with a Tier 1 carrier, 90% of people who opted in generated a report and 50% of those users outdated incorrect property information. Homeowners raved about it, and pilot customers often reported record levels of engagement. The surveys we got back proved that it solved a core issue for both insurers and homeowners. But, our time had lapsed, and there was no buying more of it.

We initially started as a self-inspection app company. We then pivoted to scoring information about homeowner’s properties from available data, emailing it to them, and driving them to correct outdated property data, with the additional option to report mitigation work done.

This “report 1st, data correction 2nd” model was huge learning for us, and resolved a lot of the issues we had with our self-inspection software. I still do think the future of resilience is a breadcrumb funnel. The goal will not be to verify mitigation actions from the jump and predict survivability, but to do the basics correctly: update property information, start communications with the homeowner, and eventually provide price-based incentives towards doing mitigation work tied to guaranteed premium reductions.

One app will not solve it all, it will be an entire ecosystem of property data and validation records, cross built with homeowner engagement and corrections. This workflow would be best built into a generalized company, like at Verisk. Our best selling products were resilience-focused lenses on standard underwriting reports, but not pure resilience plays. It is a viable company for a bootstrapped entity with previous insurance connections, but not for us as a VC backed company with VC timelines and no true carrier network as a team.

However, I still think we got farther than most resilience products have - that was because of our VC war chest. But, our product development timeline and sales pipeline got out of sync with our fundraising timeline. We also shot towards too many customers and angles instead of focusing in on one, and narrowing into a clear best-in-market product. Every strength is a weakness when it appears at the wrong time, and we were no exception.

I still believe in this field. Our homes need to prepare and get to a point where they are ready for the new world of weather that awaits them. I don’t know if it will be insurance that drives the change. And it definitely will not be Faura that wins the market (for now).

On a personal note, Valkyrie and I struggled greatly to find our place in insurance. Most of all, we missed the feeling of things being achievable. It felt like our entire professional life was being decided by committees we had never met, in rooms we could never enter into. We struggled to extract clear product feedback or sales motion issues, because it felt like it was filtered between 30-40 people before it returned to us. All information was a riddle that needed constantly deciphering. That is a tenable situation, if you feel there is an endpoint. We felt there was no endpoint.

A mentor of ours describes insurtech as a long walk in the desert without water (thank you, Bob Frady), and it’s apt. At some point, I lost the belief that I was helping anyone. It felt like cleaning a large museum and keeping it open and pristine for no one to ever enter, to ever marvel at what we curated. This is what we signed up for, but it’s what you don’t know at signing that taints the achievement of the contract in years to come.

Valkyrie and I both decided we did not want to spend our early 20’s building a company in insurance, after multiple acquisition talks failed. Our choices were wind-down or bootstrap as founders, cause rifts with our board, and cut off the rest of our team. Keep in mind, we started Faura when I was 21 and Valkyrie was 19. V was also in the space for 2 years prior. Approaching 25, I had to determine if I wanted the second half of my twenties, a time that was supposed to be about taking great risks and making great strides, to be building a company and market in an industry where neither felt possible in spirit.

We weren’t being rewarded for the traits that we liked in ourselves: traits like being crafty, moving fast, thinking outside of the box. These are things that innovation needs, but that insurance can punish. Not for no reason: the insurance industry has huge responsibility on its’ hands. I do not wish for some 20 year olds to come in and ‘disrupt’ a core institution, so this isn’t a moral judgement. It is a built-in function of an industry that has learned to stay alive through self-protection and isolation from outsiders. It is quite rare that ambition can break institutional armor at the scale insurance has created for itself.

In my earlier startup years, I lived half in Oregon and half in a walk-in closet in an apartment with 3 guys in San Francisco. We just constantly worked and dreamed about the future that we could shape. Those memories are some of the most precious I have, for the sheer naivety combined with joy of innovation that I felt daily. Our future was so imminent, I could almost sense it was in the next room over.

The shimmering, imminent future would be years away at Faura, won through resource starvation and being the last in the room to leave. It is not a future that I am against having, just not one I want to spend my all of my 20’s waiting for. I would much rather go contribute to things in a different area where I am granted the ability to fail and learn from it fast and clean, or make more money with less responsibility at a different role.

This should have been one of the first red flags: to all of the problems that we didn’t really need solved, there was a torrent of advice and guidance. To the problems we did need solved, no one had answers and time didn’t provide them. There were no fast and clean problems. We thought sticking this out was a badge of honor, and a requirement of being in insurance. In many ways, it was.

But, it’s also a sign that we were too early in the space and there was not a clear buyer - and a problem without a buyer is a charitable cause. Our urgency was not shared by the budgets of our customers who were the most economically primed to adopt, and that is not something that you can out-market or out-develop a strong product to solve.

Personally, it feels surreal to watch climate solutions fail left and right, while I debate my own desire for motherhood. I want to make a life, but I don’t know what the future will hold for that life - economically, environmentally, and ethically. This drenches me with fear. Alternatively, the future is not yet unpredictable enough to justify investment in resilience in an operational form. Climate creates panels and roundtable discussions, but not a budgetary reality. I don’t know how to reconcile that. My current desire is to help people more urgently, or to join something with more permanence and immediacy. I hope to get a job at a larger insurance-adjacent company and spend free time supporting non-profits, or join another social good startup.

But, the future is opaque for me as it stands. At the very least, I will write a book that does not require a committee or a board approval, and that will hold me. Valkyrie and I belong to a unique generation that is starting to see the impacts of climate change head on. I am most proud that we fought so hard to solve this. My brave team, who never backed away from the challenges, and fought with everything they had. I only wish I had more to give them.

To not just sit down and take the status quo took immense bravery. Watching Valkyrie and our team have that bravery and hold onto it for years, through everything we went through, was one of the most beautiful things I have ever been able to see. Being part of a team that worked to build a better world and to fit it into our current world is something I will not ever take for granted. This was my dream, and I had it. Many are not so lucky.

This world is not static. For a moment, we truly believed that.