Scout InsurTech Interview with Fast Flood

Fast Flood is a hazard simulation technology company. They seek to make flood risk assessment faster, more accessible, and more accurate, delivering up to 20,000 times faster simulations without sacrificing precision, while serving modellers, disaster experts, and infrastructure planners worldwide. Chris Luiz sat with Co-Founder, Bastian van den Bout, to learn more about how Fast Flood is shaping the future of climate resilience.

Who are your clients?

Our client base spans emergency response organizations like the UN and World Bank, modelers and engineers, and increasingly the financial industry: insurance carriers, banks, and other institutions using climate data. The common thread is users who need detailed flood information quickly and want to explore adaptation, not just quantify existing risk.

What does your product do?

FastFlood Global delivers detailed past, present, and future flood information anywhere on Earth in seconds. Users can sketch in adaptations, from nature-based solutions to levees and reservoirs, and instantly see how the flood scenario changes, so the focus shifts from covering risk to reducing it.

How much capital have you raised?

We’re bootstrapped. The business has been funded through direct incoming work and was profitable in its first year.

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

Outside. FastFlood came out of research I was working on at a university in the Netherlands, with no prior history in insurance. We later connected with the InsurTech NY accelerator program, and the insurance applications grew from there.

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

We were profitable in our first year with roughly €350K in turnover. Recurring revenue is now around 40% of the mix and growing.

Within your domain, what is the current challenge that the industry is facing?

Technically, flood modeling is getting to the point where it can deliver most of what end users want: real-time information anywhere on Earth. Technology is no longer the binding constraint. The harder problem now is the friction in communication and trust-building around these datasets: the gap between having the data and acting on it.

In traditional flood modeling, planning adaptations with communities is a long process: months, sometimes years, working through scenarios. One quiet value of that timeline is that it builds confidence on both sides, for the engineers and for the community, that everyone trusts the decision process being followed. Newer, faster technologies can skip that time, but they also risk skipping the weight and authority that traditional modeling carried with it. That’s the real challenge: bringing speed without losing the reliability that regulators and communities need in order to act.

How does Fast Flood take a unique approach to providing value?

Our approach is to bring speed and interactivity to adaptation planning without sacrificing the authority that traditional modeling provides. The product’s novelty is not just how fast it runs, but that users can draw in any adaptation, from green roofs and waterways to levees and reservoirs, and immediately see updated flood maps. That turns flood information from a static view of risk into an interactive tool for deciding what to do about it.

On the trust side, we’re investing in better ways to quantify and communicate uncertainty, and we see a productive role for large language models to sit alongside the flood model: providing not just information, but interpretation and guardrails at a local level, where there simply aren’t enough experts to advise every community individually. The goal is speed with authority, not speed instead of it.

What inspired the team to start this company?

We wanted to see the technology we’d built actually put to good use and make an impact in communities around the world. Together with a friend from my university days and a few brilliant students I’d worked with, we started this journey to develop it further and get it into the hands of people making real adaptation decisions.

Can you share any goal(s) for the next 12 months?

Most of our goals come back to impact. We have strong use cases running today, but they tend to be at large scale: emergency modeling for the UN and the World Bank, planning work with the World Food Programme. What we want to do next is run several local pilots and use them to refine the technology so it fits the day-to-day tasks of climate adaptation as closely as possible.

Scout InsurTech Thanks Its Partners