The American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact’s Fund II priorities focus on three areas for startup investment we believe will help strengthen our communities and address some of society’s greatest challenges: home resilience, housing access, and AI for social good.

Climate resilience sits at the intersection of all three challenges and is particularly important to me. The issue affects where people live, how safe they feel in their homes, whether they can recover after a disaster, and if they have the tools and information to prepare before the next one.

There are plenty of numbers that show why this matters now. In 2024, NOAA recorded 27 weather and climate events in the U.S. that each caused at least $1 billion in damage, the second-highest annual record on count. Combined, these events caused an estimated $182.7 billion in damages. Across the country, we are seeing an increase in homes exposed to flooding, wildfires, severe storms, heat, and other risks that were once treated as rare events.

But these numbers only tell part of the story.

Climate risk becomes real when it reaches your street, your home, and your family. It becomes real when a storm is no longer something you read about, but something you plan around. It becomes real when you start moving furniture away from the door, checking the weather more often, or wondering whether the fixes that worked last year will be enough this time. Stanford research shows that personal experience with disasters can increase risk perception and adaptation behaviors, and I’m no different.

I grew up in Chennai, a coastal city in South India, where climate risks show up through extreme heat and extreme rain. During the monsoon season, heavy rainfall is always a concern. Just over the past 20 years, Chennai’s rainfall trend has shifted toward high-intensity erratic rainfall, with increasingly concentrated, short-duration downpours. NASA reported that Chennai received more rainfall on December 1-2, 2015 than any single day since 1901. In my own experience, the flooding was not abstract. The streets around my home flooded almost every year, sometimes so severely that we couldn’t leave for days until the rain stopped and water receded. During more extreme rainfalls, water entered the house and we had to stay with a neighbor until it was safe to return.

I was fortunate to have a support network and place to go during a weather crisis. Eventually, we paid to raise the exterior of the house and reduce the risk of flooding in most cases. It took years of heavy rainfall for us to accept that this was not a rare event, but a new normal. And once we accepted it, it took time to figure out which solutions were practical, affordable, and most likely to work.

These experiences have shaped how I think about climate adaptation. Adaptation does not fail because solutions do not exist, it often fails because the path from risk to action is time-consuming, expensive, confusing, or unattainable. The UN estimates that 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in places that are highly vulnerable to climate change, making adaptation an urgent reality.

While a household may understand that flooding, heat, wildfire smoke, or severe storms are becoming more frequent, they may not know which upgrades matter most, who to trust, what supports are available, or whether the costs are worth it. For many families, especially in low-and-moderate communities, the barriers are practical: high upfront costs, unclear return on investments, fragmented programs, limited contractor access, language or digital barriers, and incentives that are not always aligned between homeowners, renters, landlords, insurers, utilities, and public agencies. That’s why when we think about climate resilience, we must consider better products and optimal pathways for adoption.

At the Institute, our home resilience thesis focuses on innovations that can help homes better withstand environmental challenges. We are interested in solutions that support durability, energy efficiency, weatherization, electrification, retrofits, and align financial incentives to help families prepare earlier. Our goal is to empower people to make informed, practical choices that protect their homes and their communities.

A home is more than a physical structure. It is where families build safety, stability, and wealth– a hallmark of the American dream. But climate risk is putting that foundation at risk, making it harder for families to stay rooted in the communities they call home.

Investing in resilience matters now more than ever. We hope to invest in solutions that help more people prepare before the loss happens and rebuild after losses to protect what they’ve built. If you’re building, investing, or working in this space, we’d love to connect.