🧭 RUMBO — ISSUE #006

Saludos! Happy Tuesday, and welcome to Rumbo, edition 006.

Jonathan González watched his mother wait nearly a year for an insurance adjuster to assess her home after Hurricane Maria. Water damage. A broken wheelchair ramp. She's diabetic, on dialysis, and struggling to pay her bills.

When the adjuster finally came, took photos, and submitted the claim, the answer came six months later: denied. Zero payout.

Jonathan watched $1.6 billion in insurance claims sit unresolved across Puerto Rico while families like his waited in limbo. He saw the system fail the people who needed it most.

So the computer engineer did something radical: he built Raincoat, an AI-powered climate insurance platform that pays instantly when disaster strikes. Today, his company has raised $4.5 million, secured backing from Google and SoftBank, and is protecting families across Puerto Rico, Mexico, Jamaica, and Colombia.

So grab your cafecito and dive in. If you enjoy today's edition, please forward it to your gente or share it online. ☕

Jonathan González didn't plan to revolutionize insurance. He studied computer engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, building software, solving problems, and living his life.

Then came September 20, 2017.

Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico as a catastrophic Category 4 storm. Nearly 3,000 people died. The island's infrastructure collapsed. It took Jonathan three days just to confirm his mother was alive.

When the immediate crisis passed, a slower catastrophe unfolded. His mother's home had significant damage, water seeping through the walls, and her wheelchair ramp was destroyed. She filed an insurance claim and waited. And waited.

"When they finally got back to her, they paid zero," Jonathan recalls.

She wasn't alone. More than 13,000 Puerto Ricans remained in insurance limbo hell a full year after Maria. $1.6 billion in claims stayed unresolved two years later. The system designed to help people recover was failing spectacularly.

Jonathan looked at the problem through an engineer's eyes. "With life insurance, someone dies, and you get paid the agreed-upon amount. The same concept can be applied to weather. If you know something happened, then you can give people their money immediately."

The question was how.

In 2018, Jonathan and three partners (all software engineers with zero insurance background) founded Raincoat. They approached insurance companies and reinsurers with a radical idea: parametric insurance powered by AI.

Traditional insurance requires damage assessment, adjusters, negotiations, and paperwork. Parametric insurance works differently. When a specific, measurable event occurs (wind speeds hit 100 mph, rainfall exceeds 10 inches), the payout triggers automatically. No adjusters. No paperwork. No waiting.

"You have a screwdriver and a hammer and pliers and all different tools intended for different things to cover gaps," Jonathan explains. Raincoat became one of those tools.

But the insurance industry pushed back. How do you detect an event accurately enough to activate individual policies? How do you build risk models? How do you process the data at scale?

Jonathan and his team answered every question. They built AI models. Ran simulations of historical disasters. Created theoretical scenarios. Showed the insurance companies it worked.

In 2022, Raincoat raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Anthemis (a major insurtech investor) and backed by SoftBank's SB Opportunity Fund, Puerto Rico's Banco Popular, Chilean financial group Consorcio, Miami's 305 Ventures, and Divergent Capital.

Then in 2024, Google selected Raincoat for its prestigious Founders Fund, awarding the company $150,000 in cash, Google Cloud credits, and mentorship. Raincoat was among just 20 Black and Latino-led AI startups chosen from across the nation, and the first climate insurance company based in Puerto Rico to receive this recognition.

Today, Raincoat operates across four countries, working with governments, banks, and insurance partners to protect families, small businesses, and farmers from catastrophic weather events: hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and droughts.

The company's technology monitors weather patterns in real-time using AI. When a triggering event occurs, payouts are processed instantly. No forms. No waiting. No denials based on technicalities.

Carlos José Báez, an auto paint shop owner in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, experienced this firsthand. After Maria devastated his home in 2017, he submitted insurance claims for over $25,000. He received $11,000. "We had a lot of property damage and insurance, but they didn't want to pay," he said.

Years later, when installing solar panels, his contractor offered Raincoat-powered climate insurance. Remembering Maria's devastation, Báez signed up.

When Hurricane Fiona clipped Puerto Rico in 2022, Báez received a $75 payout two days later, automatically. He and his wife used it to buy groceries after their fridge stopped working. "I didn't have to fill out any documents, and they didn't have to come see anything. The process was very quick."

That's the point. In disasters, speed matters. Every hour without power, every day without food, every week without shelter compounds the trauma. Raincoat removes the bureaucracy when people need help most.

For Jonathan, this remains deeply personal. "In a way, every time there's a new challenge, I get a little bit more motivated to try to overcome it. Programs like these give not only access to capital and resources and partnerships that are required to tackle these challenges, but also the courage and support that you need as a community that this is worthy of solving."

He's also thinking bigger. "Puerto Rico has yet to produce a venture-backed unicorn, and I'd love for Raincoat to take a serious shot at changing that," he says. "There's incredible talent and potential on the island, world-class people who can absolutely compete on a global stage. Whether through Raincoat or by helping others, I want to show that high-growth, globally relevant companies can be built from Puerto Rico, and built by Puerto Ricans."

As climate change intensifies, the disasters Raincoat protects against are becoming more frequent and more severe. The need for faster, smarter insurance has never been greater.

Jonathan González turned personal tragedy into a solution protecting thousands. From his mother's denied claim to building AI-powered climate insurance backed by Google and SoftBank, he's proving that Puerto Rican innovation can solve global problems.

The engineer who just wanted to help his mom is now building Puerto Rico's path to its first unicorn.

Explore Raincoat: raincoat.com
Connect with Jonathan:
🔗 LinkedIn: Jonathan Gonzalez
📸 Follow Raincoat: @getraincoat

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