Climate risk is priced by a building's location - not by how it performs. Two buildings on the same street, one designed to survive an extended grid outage and one that fails in days, are underwritten identically. Fortiia certifies the difference.
The operating model
Fortiia is building the credit score for buildings.
A permanent performance record for every certified building - used by insurers, lenders, and buyers the way FICO is used in consumer finance. The first physics-based resilience score for buildings.
Built by the co-creator of WUFI (Fraunhofer IBP) and the co-founder of PHIUS, co-author of PHIUS REVIVE 2024.
Why this matters
Same street. Same price. Different physics.
$70T
The US built environment - the only asset class of this scale with no standardized, multi-peril resilience score.
US residential + commercial real estate · Zillow (2025), NAREIT · Initial addressable market: ~241,000 new units annually across FL, TX, CO, CA high-risk corridors
$100B+
Global insured losses from natural catastrophes - every year for six years running (2020–2025). The market still cannot price this at the building level.
Swiss Re Institute · sigma 1/2026
55–74%
Claim-frequency reduction documented for IBHS FORTIFIED-certified homes - the actuarial precedent for the multi-peril, simulation-based standard Fortiia extends it into.
IBHS · 40,195 homes · Hurricane Sally 2020 · peer-reviewed 2025
Markets cannot price what they cannot measure. The same performance signal insurers need today is the one lenders, institutional investors, public agencies, and emerging resilience-finance instruments - including parametric insurance - will need next.
Private insurers are withdrawing from climate-exposed markets, not repricing them. State Farm and Allstate paused new California homeowner policies in 2022-2023. Florida's insurer of last resort grew from roughly 550,000 policies in 2021 to 1.4 million in 2023. Texas homeowner premiums rose 55% and Colorado's rose 76.6% between 2019 and 2024. Most mortgages require hazard insurance as a loan covenant - the FHFA has flagged climate risk and insurance availability as a material concern for the roughly $7 trillion GSE mortgage portfolio.
PHIUS REVIVE 2024 was published in July 2024. Two years later, no funded competitor has built a commercial platform on it: existing resilience credentials are narrower - IBHS FORTIFIED is wind-only and prescriptive, not simulation-based; LEED v5's resilience prerequisites are process checklists, not physics models. The first-mover position is open.
Sources: CA FAIR Plan · Citizens Property Insurance · Texas Comptroller · Colorado Sun · FHFA
What we are building
01
A Certification Framework
The Fortiia Resilience Standard defines three certification tiers, an optional Zero carbon add-on, and five performance pillars for new construction - the first simulation-based building resilience credential in the US market. Builders earn a permanent, documented certificate backed by physics modeling.
02
A Certification Engine
The Fortiia platform ingests actual building data and determines what each building has earned - escalating from a prescriptive compliance check at the entry tier to full physics-based hygrothermal and dynamic thermal simulation for Resilient and Prime certifications, run on the C3RRO engine. Every path is closed by a credentialed rater, on site.
03
A Performance Data Layer
Every certified building enters a permanent, queryable record. As the registry grows, it becomes the actuarial dataset that gives insurers building-level risk visibility - the data infrastructure that has never existed until now. Over time, the registry becomes the shared resilience reference used across insurance, lending, valuation, and public policy.
Today, resilience has no common unit of measure. Without one, insurers can't price it, lenders can't finance it, and owners can't capture its value. Fortiia provides that common language - the data infrastructure that lets resilience function as an economic asset, not just a design intention.
The standard
Each tier documents verified performance. Issued only on completed evidence, with third-party inspection.
Fortiia Ready
Thermal survivability and envelope baseline verified. Entry-level credential for climate-conscious builders.
Fortiia Resilient
Full 5-pillar certification. The market standard credential - the one insurers, lenders, and buyers will reference.
Fortiia Prime
All pillars plus extreme climate scenarios and site fortification. Top tier for high-exposure markets.
Fortiia Zero
Optional zero-carbon add-on layered onto any tier. Positions certified buildings for ESG and green finance instruments.
Every Fortiia certification is evaluated across five performance pillars - each mapping to a specific, measurable physical outcome.
Thermal Survivability
Hygrothermal Envelope Integrity
Site Hazard Fortification
Lifecycle Cost Documentation
Quality Assurance
The three tiers are a designed progression, not three price points. Ready gives builders and owners a credential to market today, independent of any insurer decision. Resilient is calibrated to the threshold insurers, lenders, and buyers are expected to reference as recognition matures - Prime extends coverage further, for the highest-exposure markets.
Founded by the scientists who built the tools - and the businesses that scaled them
Fortiia wasn't founded by scientists with an idea. It was founded by the researchers who created the standards the industry already uses - and then built and scaled the organizations that run on them.
Florian Antretter
Chief Executive Officer (Interim)
Co-developed WUFI at Fraunhofer IBP - the hygrothermal simulation tool used by building scientists across 150+ countries. Founded and operates C3RRO, the cloud-deployed simulation engine powering the Fortiia platform. Built US market fluency through applied research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
Fraunhofer IBP · WUFI · C3RRO · ORNL · NRELKatrin Klingenberg
Chief Science Officer
Co-founded the Passive House Institute US (PHIUS) and built North America's largest passive building certification network - 3,000+ credentialed professionals - over two decades, including co-authoring PHIUS REVIVE 2024, the peer-reviewed standard on which Fortiia is built.
PHIUS · PHIUS REVIVE 2024Our Vision
A built world valued on how it performs, not just where it stands.
- Fortiia Building Intelligence
Our Mission
Fortiia makes building resilience measurable, certifiable, and insurable: the physics-based record that insurers, lenders, and buyers underwrite against.
Get in touch
Fortiia is in early conversations with insurers, investors, and a small number of builders.
Inquiries are treated in strict confidence.