San Francisco, CA – March 14, 2025 – ResiQuant announced today it has closed a $4 million seed funding round led by LDV Capital, with participation from Foothill Ventures, Pear VC, Alumni Ventures, and several strategic angel investors. The investment will accelerate ResiQuant's mission to revolutionize how property insurers assess and manage catastrophe risks, bringing much-needed stability to markets struggling with climate volatility and seismic hazards.

ResiQuant's platform fuses structural engineering expertise with advanced AI to deliver building-level insights that traditional data sources consistently miss. The company's specialized AI agents analyze site inspection photos, aerial imagery, and publicly available visuals to conduct comprehensive vulnerability assessments, identifying critical structural weaknesses that determine survival during disasters.

ResiQuant's AI identifies critical structural features that determine a building's performance during disasters, highlighted here in a multi-hazard commercial property assessment.

"Property carriers make billion-dollar exposure and capital allocation decisions with dangerously incomplete data," says Dr. Omar Issa, ResiQuant's CEO. "We're transforming this paradigm by delivering engineering-grade analysis that reveals hidden structural vulnerabilities in every building – helping carriers underwrite with confidence and maintain coverage precisely where others are forced to retreat."

This innovation comes at a critical moment for the $200B U.S. property insurance market, with carriers facing unprecedented challenges: reinsurance costs surging 50% since 2020, catastrophic losses reaching $217B in 2024, and insurers increasingly withdrawing coverage from high-risk regions.

ResiQuant’s approach is shaped by the real-world experiences of its founders: Dr. Issa, a second-generation structural engineer raised in the Bay Area who conducted earthquake research at UCLA under Professor Henry Burton, and Dr. Francisco Galvis, a structural and forensic engineer that grew up in earthquake-prone Colombia. The two met at Stanford University’s John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center in 2020 while pursuing their PhDs, building a partnership rooted in both rigorous research and hands-on field expertise.

Their connection was forged during the COVID-19 pandemic, working through caffeinated late nights building powerful catastrophe models for vulnerable existing buildings. While Dr. Galvis focused his thesis on pre-Northridge steel frames in San Francisco buildings, Dr. Issa specialized in recovery modeling using machine learning. These complementary areas of expertise formed the perfect foundation for ResiQuant's technology. The founders spent countless hours in the Blume Center, discussing engineering challenges and developing innovative approaches that would eventually inform the core of their company's offering.

The co-founders' first shared workspace at Stanford's Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, where they gained special authorization to collaborate in person during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both founders have conducted post-disaster inspections following other major events including the the 2019 Ridgecrest Earthquake, 2022 Michoacan (Mexico) Earthquake, 2022 Hurricane Ian, 2022 Hurricane Nicole, and 2023 Kahramanmaras (Turkiye) earthquake, giving them firsthand understanding of why buildings fail.

"As the frequency and severity of earth and climate disasters intensify across the P&C industry, carriers must adopt more granular, engineering-driven approaches to assessing property risk," says Dr. Laurie Johnson, a leading disaster risk management expert and ResiQuant advisor. "Objective, building-level insights are fundamental to refining underwriting decision-making and risk modeling, and enhancing community resilience to future hazards."

ResiQuant's approach delivers tangible outcomes for insurance carriers: reduced inspection costs through virtual assessments, improved loss ratios and higher profitability in challenging regions, better reinsurance terms from validated data, and maintained coverage in markets where other insurers are retreating.

"Since 2012, LDV Capital invests in deep technical teams building businesses powered by visual technology and artificial intelligence," says Evan Nisselson, Founder and General Partner at LDV Capital. "ResiQuant is developing a platform that utilizes agentic AI and computer vision to transform imagery into actionable, building-level insights. The insurance industry is on the brink of significant modernization and digital transformation, and we are honored to partner with them to help carriers make smarter, faster, and more profitable decisions while driving resilience in the built environment."

Currently supporting earthquake risk assessment for commercial, multi-family, and single-family properties, ResiQuant plans to expand its platform to include wildfires and windstorms, creating a comprehensive multi-hazard solution. The new funding will be used to extend the capabilities of ResiQuant's platform and grow their engineering and AI units to support carriers across all major US property markets.

ResiQuant co-founders Francisco Galvis (left) and Omar Issa (right) at Pear VC during PearX S24.

Beyond the business impact, ResiQuant serves a deeper purpose that resonates with the founders' personal journeys: creating a more resilient built environment. When insurance works effectively, it helps communities bounce back from disasters. By enabling carriers to maintain coverage and reward resilient buildings, ResiQuant is working toward a future where property owners have both the coverage they need and clear financial incentives to build better.

About ResiQuant
ResiQuant is an end-to-end AI platform revolutionizing how property carriers operate and scale in regions prone to climate and seismic risks. Founded by Dr. Omar Issa and Dr. Francisco Galvis, the platform combines structural engineering expertise with AI to pinpoint critical building vulnerabilities and attributes that determine survival during disasters — from earthquakes to climate-driven catastrophes such as wildfires and severe storms.

About LDV Capital
LDV Capital is a thesis-driven early-stage venture fund investing in people building businesses powered by visual technology that leverage computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. Deep knowledge of the domain, extensive expert network and unique platform initiatives have made LDV Capital a leader in the visual tech ecosystem. Led by serial entrepreneur Evan Nisselson, LDV Capital has been investing in pre-seed and seed-stage teams across North America and Europe since 2012.

About Foothill Ventures
Foothill Ventures is a technology-focused venture fund based in Los Altos, California. We make pre-seed, seed (preferred), and A-round investments in startups across software, life science, and deep tech.

About Pear VC
Pear VC is an early-stage VC firm that invests in early-stage companies at the pre-seed and seed stages. In just under a decade, Pear has already yielded seven companies valued over $1B, three public companies, and many more legendary companies in the making. Some of the notable success stories to date include DoorDash, Vanta, Gusto, Guardant Health, Senti Bio, Branch, Viz.ai and Aurora Solar.