Mantic Raises $25 Million for AI Forecasting

A London-based startup whose artificial intelligence system outperformed human competitors in a recent forecasting tournament has raised $25 million in seed funding, led by Radical Ventures at an undisclosed valuation.

Mantic's system assigned probabilities to political, economic, and cultural developments more accurately than human contestants in the summer 2026 Metaculus Cup, an online forecasting tournament that ended this month. The result marked the first time AI entrants dominated the competition. Backers include Microsoft's venture fund M12, startup Thinking Machines Lab, and Balderton Capital.

The company specializes frontier AI models from other labs to improve their forecasting abilities. It tests its predictive system on historical data, grades its performance, then refines it. Chief executive Toby Shevlane, who co-founded Mantic with Ben Day in 2024 after leaving Google DeepMind, said his earlier work as a research scientist sparked the idea because he needed help predicting global events relevant to AI. "We're now upgrading the level at which humans can understand the future," he said.

One advantage Mantic had over human forecasters was avoiding a herd mentality. Shevlane pointed to a question where humans overwhelmingly bet that a Shakira song would not overtake "Waka Waka" on the Billboard Hot 100. That turned out to be wrong, but Mantic did not bet heavily on the consensus. Early in the tournament, Mantic also gave Colombian presidential candidate Abelardo De La Espriella about a 40 percent chance of winning, compared with a roughly 30 percent consensus forecast. De La Espriella ultimately won, and Mantic went on to outperform every human contestant and all but one bot.

Aaron Rosenberg, a partner at Radical Ventures who has joined Mantic's board, said the startup has drawn interest from companies and government agencies globally, some of which have already integrated its AI. Hedge funds and trading firms were particularly eager, he said. "If Mantic is superhuman as it is, they can make money off of that immediately".