RMS

Our Story

They said it couldn't be done. We thought otherwise.

As a graduate student at Stanford, in the heart of earthquake country, I wrote a business plan to spin out university R&D and commercialize a computer model that could quantify earthquake risk in three California cities. With a modest seed investment from my family and an office in my apartment, I convinced a few friends and fellow researchers to join up. Believe me, there was no shortage of skeptics. The financial industry and academic establishment told us that the problem warranted endless study in traditional silos. Venture capitalists struggled to understand what the category and business model would be ("catastrophe risk modeling?"). Fortunately, we were naïve and had the absolute conviction that if we got the right multidisciplinary team in the room, we could create a whole new category of analytic technology—and launch a new industry.

More than two decades later, we are now the world leader in catastrophic risk modeling. From earthquakes and hurricanes to terrorism and infectious diseases, our models provide critical risk management solutions to hundreds of financial institutions around the world. At RMS, we believe knowledge is power. Our work may serve some of the leading industries driving today's global economy, but we also believe it can make a real and positive impact on people's lives. How societies understand and manage risk affects us all. At RMS, our ultimate goal is to help create a more sustainable and resilient global society through a better understanding of catastrophic events.

Based in our headquarters in Silicon Valley and in offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, our team of nearly a thousand professionals may be a bit larger than it used to be, but we're as ambitious and innovative as ever. From day one, our passion has been innovation driven by the courage to tackle the problems others say can't be solved. Can we quantify the risks from climate change? Simulate how medical breakthroughs might lead to dramatic improvements in life expectancy? Deliver supercomputing in the cloud? Can our technology platform help transform an entire industry? Once again, they say it can't be done. We think otherwise.

Hemant Shah
Cofounder, President and CEO
San Francisco, California, 2011