Windward expands into California with ZestyAI wildfire underwriting tool

Windward Risk Managers did not walk into California with a blunt statewide appetite and hope for the best. The US homeowners specialist, founded in 2005, expanded its use of ZestyAI’s risk intelligence platform and put Z-FIRE at the center of its California push, after already running Z-PROPERTY across its Florida homeowners portfolio. That matters because in California, property-level wildfire intelligence is no longer a nice-to-have modeling upgrade. It is becoming part of the price of admission.

Z-FIRE is built to do the kind of work that broad territorial maps cannot. It uses computer vision and machine learning to score individual properties for wildfire exposure, separating homes that are likely to be heavily damaged from those more likely to survive a fire event. For carriers trying to write in hard-catastrophe markets, that distinction reaches directly into underwriting rules, inspection strategy, eligibility, pricing and renewal decisions. ZestyAI says the tool is built for insurers and approved for rating and underwriting in wildfire-exposed states nationwide.

California is the real test case. Insurers have pulled back from wildfire-prone areas, the state’s FAIR Plan has grown sharply, and regulators have been trying to stabilize the market while expanding the use of catastrophe models. ZestyAI said on Feb. 5, 2025, that Z-FIRE was filing-ready in California and could continue to be used for rate segmentation and underwriting under the PRID process. The company also said Z-FIRE was last included in an approved California rate filing in 2024. Separately, the California FAIR Plan approved Z-FIRE for dwelling-policy rate setting, giving the state’s insurer of last resort a way to distinguish between mitigated and unmitigated properties.

That is the larger story behind Windward’s move. Attila Toth, founder and chief executive of ZestyAI, framed the expansion as proof of how advanced analytics can help insurers operate more confidently in wildfire-exposed markets. Windward’s chief risk officer, Gard Olbers, said Z-PROPERTY had already given the company accurate property insights and broad coverage across its Florida portfolio, which makes the California deployment look less like an experiment and more like an operating model. In a state where the California Department of Insurance and Commissioner Ricardo Lara have been pushing reforms to widen coverage and support model use, Z-FIRE looks less like a niche analytics product and more like infrastructure for catastrophe-aware underwriting.