Business Moves: FM Acquires Wildfire Intelligence Firm FortressFire

Commercial property insurer FM said it has acquired FortressFire, a provider of wildfire intelligence solutions for homes, businesses and communities.

FortressFire will operate as an independent, wholly owned division of Johnston, Rhode Island-based FM and will continue its work to quantify ignition risk through fire physics, leading to verifiable mitigation recommendations and monitoring.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

San Mateo, California-based FortressFire enables insurers and property owners to better understand and manage wildfire risk down to an individual property level. Its wildfire intelligence solutions include aerial wildfire reports, monitoring, analytics, ground inspections and mitigation assessments to provide actionable, structure-specific insights and mitigation recommendations.

“FortressFire shares FM’s core belief in the power of data-driven, location-based risk mitigation and protection measures to help clients better understand and manage wildfire exposure,” said Malcolm Roberts, chairman and chief executive officer of FM, a mutual insurer with a long history of scientific research and engineering experience.

“For years we’ve argued that the best risk management is ignition prevention—and that the path to insurability runs through science,” said Michael Ashker, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of FortressFire. “To have an engineering-focused insurer of FM’s caliber put its capital and conviction behind that thesis is the strongest possible validation of what our team has built.”