Introducing OmniFire - Property-Level Wildfire Risk API for P&C Underwriters and Risk Providers

What a year of listening taught us

In late 2025, Headwaters Economics, the wildfire analytics firm Pyrologix, and the U.S. Fire Administration set out to take stock of how the industry actually models wildfire risk. They started with more than 150 risk models, narrowed the field to the 59 that met their criteria, and then interviewed 30 of the people who do this work for a living: fire physicists, structural engineers, catastrophe modelers, and insurers.

The experts disagreed about almost everything, from whether physics-based or simplified operational models are the future to how close anyone is to modeling the way fire jumps from one structure to the next. On one point, they converged almost unanimously. As one interviewee put it, “models are only as good as the data inputs.” A field full of people who build models for a living, concluded that the single highest-leverage gap in wildfire risk is not another model. It is a scalable, validated measurement of the physical condition of individual buildings and the land immediately around them.

We did not need the report to tell us that, though it was striking to watch a field arrive at the conclusion we had reached the hard way. One of us lost a home in the Marshall Fire, the suburban firestorm outside Boulder that destroyed more than a thousand structures in an afternoon. Over the past year, we have sat across the table from carriers, MGAs, reinsurance brokers, and catastrophe modelers, and a few themes surfaced in nearly every conversation. Together, they became the brief for the product we are launching today.

Read the full post on Substack: https://omnigeo.substack.com/p/introducing-omnifire-property-level