Jumpstart Insurance

Jumpstart Insurance is a California-founded parametric earthquake MGA and surplus-lines broker that set out, from 2015 onward, to close the California earthquake protection gap with a product form that traditional indemnity cover and the California Earthquake Authority (CEA) had not meaningfully compressed: a small, fast, no-deductible lump-sum payout triggered automatically by ground shaking rather than by inspected loss. It was founded in November 2015 by Kate Stillwell — a structural engineer with a Stanford civil-engineering master's and a UC Berkeley Haas MBA, prior experience as an earthquake modeller at EQECAT (now CoreLogic), and co-founder credentials at the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation. The consumer product launched in California in October 2018 and expanded to Oregon and Washington in 2020.

Operational status — acquired, active inside Neptune. Jumpstart is not wound down. In October 2021 it was acquired by Neptune Flood Inc., a St. Petersburg, Florida-based digital flood MGA, for undisclosed terms. Kate Stillwell became President of Jumpstart Parametric Insurance at Neptune. The Jumpstart brand and product survived the acquisition: the standalone www.jumpstartinsurance.com storefront is live as of 2026-04-22, and policies in California, Oregon, and Washington are now distributed through Neptune's agent portal as well as the direct-to-consumer channel. Neptune itself IPO'd on the NYSE (ticker NP) on 1 October 2025, pricing at $20 per share and raising approximately $368M in a 100% secondary offering. In the S-1 and IPO coverage, Neptune described the parametric earthquake line as less than 1% of the portfolio — strategic as a data-and-expertise acquisition and a platform for diversifying into further perils, not as a material premium line today.

What the product actually does. Jumpstart writes a fixed-payout parametric earthquake policy: $10,000 for consumers (renters and homeowners), $20,000 for small businesses. The trigger is objective and external — a peak ground velocity of 30 cm/s or more, as determined by the USGS ShakeMap tool for the insured's census block, which corresponds roughly to the "red zone" on the public USGS map. When the trigger fires, Jumpstart sends an SMS to each policyholder in the affected zone; the policyholder confirms earthquake-related expenses were incurred, and the lump sum is deposited directly to bank account — no deductible, no adjusters, no paperwork, in a matter of days. The product is explicitly not a replacement for indemnity earthquake cover: it is positioned as rapid post-event liquidity for out-of-pocket recovery costs (deductibles on the primary policy, temporary housing, broken contents, lost income).

Capacity stack. During the independent-company phase (2018-2021), Jumpstart was a surplus-lines broker placing the parametric policy onto Channel Syndicate 2015 at Lloyd's (a SCOR Group-supported syndicate) through AmWINS as wholesale broker and administrator. Post-acquisition, Jumpstart sits on Neptune's broader capacity stack, which Neptune has publicly associated with AXA, Lloyd's of London, Transverse, and — added in later years — Somers Syndicate 3705 at Lloyd's. Neptune's filings do not break out which specific paper carries the earthquake line today at the syndicate level.

Funding. Disclosed venture funding across the independent-company phase was modest — on the order of $2-3M in seed capital from Insurtech Gateway, Village Capital, Plug and Play Insurtech, Berkeley Angel Network, Atlas InsurTech, and Republic crowdfunding investors. There is no disclosed priced Series A. Jumpstart did not reach independent scale before the Neptune exit. Investors' return mechanic ran through the October 2021 acquisition (undisclosed terms) and, indirectly, through Neptune's 2025 IPO.

MGA-vs-platform caveat. The same caveat that applies to Arbol (climate parametrics) and Parametrix (cloud-outage parametrics) applies here, at smaller scale. Jumpstart's "platform" — the USGS ShakeMap monitoring, the PGV-to-census-block trigger logic, the SMS-driven payout workflow — is marketed as technology, but the commercial relationship that actually ships is capacity bundled with the trigger infrastructure, not software a carrier can license into its own underwriting workstation. A reader shopping for an earthquake-risk modelling SaaS or a parametric trigger-calculation engine should read this fiche as a product-and-capacity story (now consolidated under Neptune Insurance Holdings) rather than as a vendor selection.

Analyst gap. No Gartner, Celent, Forrester, or Novarica leader-quadrant placement surfaces in public indexing. Coverage is concentrated in insurance trade press — Insurance Journal, Reinsurance News, Carrier Management, PropertyCasualty360, Coverager, InsTech London — plus one Guy Carpenter methodology note on USGS ShakeMap parametric transactions and, post-acquisition, the Neptune Insurance Holdings S-1 and NYSE: NP IPO coverage (October 2025), in which Jumpstart appears as a sub-1% subsidiary line.