Company: Plain Site
Year Founded: 2024
Headquarters: London, UK
Number of Full Time Employees: 3

Company Stage: Pilot
Are You Fundraising?: Yes
If 'Yes', For What Stage: Pre-seed

Contact Info: [email protected]

We’re working on physical resilience that currently goes unverified. A property owner can spend their money making a site harder to flood with all sorts of defenses, and then insurance renewal comes around and nothing changes.

In the harder markets, the carrier has already walked away, so there’s no cover to be had at any price. But where cover does survive, the excess is often punishing and conditions tighten. And so the work might have made an actual difference — but it’s invisible to those who can actually decide whether the asset stays insurable or not.

Plain Site exists to close that loop. We design the intervention on the land that the owner already controls. We then model what it does to the site’s loss curve and monitor whether it keeps performing. And on that basis, we can then write insurance against the result we can, we can defend. So the evidence is what keeps the risk insurable and lets us structure the deductible around defenses we can prove are working.

This loop isn’t new in the industry. Cyber insurance has built businesses around pricing a verified control instead of waiting for claims history. Climate risk just doesn't have that yet, and so that’s exactly what we’re building.

  The first shift that we see is in premium increases. Then what follows is either excess deductible — changes and terms tightening — and then finally, the insurer might decide to exclude the peril altogether.

What that means on the ground isn’t actually about insurance, because insurability sits upstream of credit. We spoke to a commercial lender who told us that they fear two things: that the asset is either too risky to lend on, and/or that it becomes uninsurable and breaks the insurance covenant inside the loan. So in their view, an uninsurable building becomes one that you can’t finance, and then if you can’t finance it, you can’t sell it.

These buildings and sites are being used by operating businesses. Just an inch or two of water on a production floor stops trading and interrupts their operations for months. So unchecked, this stops being about damage to buildings. It’s starting to become about money quietly writing off entire areas as places it just won’t go.

 I’m certainly not positioned to solve this alone, and most of the past few months have essentially been about assembling the people that can cover what I can’t. I come from the built environment. I trained and worked as an architect, and it left me with a habit of seeing value in the land that everyone else typically writes off.

So where others saw leftover space, I saw resilient infrastructure. These are surfaces that could be absorbing water but have been paved over, and so then now they allow water to run off and threaten operations.

Across the rest of the founding team, we have Mark, who runs the hazard science. He’s a civil engineer turned hydrologist, finishing his PhD at Cambridge and uses machine learning to model flood probability. Then we have Ollie, who oversees product and runs the loss modeling. He led the UK Climate Adaptation Finance policy. And then we have Sam, who runs operations. He’s a chartered accountant with eight years across transaction advisory, restructuring, and financial regulation.

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 Our product is one engine with several modeling modules working together. We start with a close look at a specific site to see how water actually arrives across a range of storm profiles.

A violent burst and a three-day soak can be equally rare, but do entirely different things to the same building. Then we translate that hazard into likely damage, tuned to what the building actually does, since a manufacturing floor and a van showroom, for example, fail at different depths and for different reasons.

Next, we scan for places to introduce interventions on the owner’s own ground and weigh what each one does against what it costs. We then favor nature-based measures that absorb and slow water where it collects and that improve as they mature. Then we re-run the whole model with each intervention in place across every scenario and take the difference in expected annual loss.

It’s this reduction that turns an abandoned risk back into a bindable one and lets us structure the deductible against defenses we can prove work. Finally, we put sensors on site so we can prove that the intervention still holds at renewal. And because the policy pays at a verified loss at the site, our view is that a defense that works is essentially an avoided claim.

  At this stage, we’re focusing on commercial owner-operators, so think manufacturing or motor trade sites.

One motor trade we looked at with a large carrier experienced flood damage from a single event that was 143 times the premium that the customer was paying. Their renewal is now a hard conversation. They either keep the flood cover on a site that will flood the same way again or walk away from a customer who’s been on the books for years. That’s the pattern brokers are seeing everywhere.

A separate broker told us that the flood exclusions and flood conditions are appearing on more and more policies and that there’s no consistency. One insurer’s mapping software says a site is fine, and the next one won’t quote at all. And so a member already sitting with one insurer that offers flood cover is essentially stuck paying whatever the insurer charges because no one else will touch the risk.

 I’d say that it’s probably the fact that we’re not selling defenses and we're not just selling insurance, but that the product is about getting both at once. So the interventions we propose are a condition of the cover, and the cover is what makes the interventions worth buying. And the cleanest way I’ve found to explain this is by pointing at a market that already exists.

I previously mentioned cyber. Cyber insurance is fundamentally a different approach. It underwrites against verified security control instead of waiting for that claims history to build. So if you want the cover, you need the firewalls, you need the monitoring, the controls in place first. Here, risk management sits inside the risk transfer, and that model has been validated in the market for over 15 years and now underwrites one of the fastest-growing lines of the industry.

So we’re doing the same thing for flood and other climate risks. You reduce the risk in a way that the underwriter can verify, and the risk becomes insurable and the terms, cover, conditions, deductible, they start to reflect the control they can see. So once someone sees that the mechanism already exists, that it already works, the flood version stops sounding so exotic

There was a moment at the end of January this year. The proposition I was developing just wasn’t landing, and I got to a point where continuing down that road felt like it was just stubbornness.

What got me through that was realizing I’d started building what I thought the business needed to be: tech first, tech only — sell the modeling and the risk analysis to someone else and let them act on it. And the trouble was that a few partners and customers kept telling me in different ways that information alone just wasn’t gonna shift anything for them without the evidence to back it up.

Eventually, that clicked, and the whole positioning changed.

We couldn’t just sell the information to someone else to underwrite. We had to take more of the value chain and bear the risk of what our own modeling proposed, and that’s the version that became an MGA [Managing General Agent].

 Some of the best advice I got was to solve a bigger part of the problem. I’d add that you should also be willing to change the shape of your company to make the work actually happen. So for us, that meant don’t settle for just providing information.

Adaptation is inherently hard because it requires you to reckon with the real physical world — so accept that your model might need to also take on more for that to work. Measuring the risk is a good start, but the harder question might be what stake are you willing to take in it? And I imagine there is probably more than one good answer to that.

I found that a practical version of thinking about this was also to find the ‘what breaks’ moment. For our customers, that point is where a flood stops the business or breaks the loan covenant or makes the site impossible to sell or insure. And that moment is where there’s value because it’s the thing that they’ll actually pay to prevent.

 In my view, most capital in this space is flowing into measurement, so risk analytics, hazard data, platforms that score a portfolio. But thinking about where it should flow actually makes me think back to architecture.

For every big development or master plan, you’d often hear the phrase: what happens beyond the ‘red line boundary’? That is essentially the end of the ownership line, because while the ownership line might end where the site ends, water doesn’t. Councils and even groups of farmers are already making flood interventions at this landscape level, and few insurers are watching how those interventions change the risk and insurability of the assets around them.

I know that the Flood Action Coalition, organized by The Conduit, is starting to look at this, and it seems really promising. The translation we’re developing at the individual commercial customer level is what makes this possible. Once you can turn a physical intervention into an insurable term for that one asset, you can start doing it for interventions reshaping risk across a whole landscape — like in the instance of farmers and councils.

So I believe that opens up a much larger market than the one that we’re starting with now.

 I’m finding to my surprise that the insurance industry is quite fascinating!

Something an insurer recently taught me is that nearly every surplus line of insurance used to be buried inside another policy. So terrorism, for example, was just a line item in property cover. That’s until 9/11, which then made it a risk of its own, and a new market appeared pretty much overnight.

So the point here is that catastrophes create the opening of a new class of insurance, and that’s exactly what we’re starting to see with climate adaptation now. Flood is increasingly excluded from commercial policies in the same way, and we’re seeing the market then increasingly interested in pricing it as its own thing.

So the models exist, and the underwriters we’ve spoken to agree that the exposure is real and it’s worsening. But what’s missing is the proof — evidence in the format that they can sign off on, then actually binding the risk, and then a season of performance data behind it.

So the practical thing I’d say to anyone working in adaptation is that it’s your job to make the first piece of evidence exist in the format that the person you need actually uses. That’s what we're currently working on.

How are you seeing insurance policies and coverage change in response to climate risks in your market?

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