San Diego-based First Cap Property Insurance Solutions has doubled its California premiums written between 2024 and 2025, with an additional 40% growth in the past year alone, capitalizing on a property insurance crisis that has left major carriers retreating from the state.

Founded in 2020, First Cap currently insures approximately 50,000 homes throughout California. The company’s growth comes as many larger insurers — including State Farm and Allstate — paused or dropped coverage in fire-prone areas after the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton wildfires destroyed more than 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County.

“During the fires last year, we were one of the few people that stayed open during that time,” said Kevin Kilkenny, CEO of First Cap. “A lot of the people closed their zip codes, and due to some of the politics in Sacramento, they were pulling away from California. But because we’re a California company we felt like we’re going to stay in the fight, and it’s been going well.”

First Cap insured 13 homes destroyed in the Palisades wildfire, a $9 million loss. Reinsurance partnerships and subrogation rights allowed the company to recover financially. Since then, the firm has been underwriting for homeowners forced into the state-backed FAIR Plan, which surged to $768 billion in exposure — a 250% increase since September 2022.

California premiums have risen 84% since 2020, according to a Stanford University study, and 11.3% of all homes in the state are now uninsured, per LendingTree data. The FAIR Plan, designed in 1968 to help uninsured Angelenos after the Watts Riots, was never intended to cover wildfire losses at current scale.

“[FAIR plans] are not priced for wildfires. They’re priced for this inner-city element,” Kilkenny said. First Cap positioned itself to fill the gap, providing liability coverage that supplements the FAIR Plan’s limited policies.

As a newer entrant without legacy underwriting, First Cap had an advantage over established carriers struggling to update their risk models through the California Department of Insurance’s lengthy rate-increase approval process. “We came in with a fresh balance sheet,” Kilkenny said. “These other people were trying to clean up old problems and old underwriting methodologies.”

Looking ahead, First Cap is expanding into Northern California to diversify its portfolio and is also seeing growing demand for condominium property insurance in the San Diego market. “People [other insurers] were de-risking or getting out of that condo market, so we’ve seen an uptick of that,” Kilkenny said.

Sources: San Diego Business Journal, SDBJ