AI startup Mantic raises $25 million for superhuman forecasting

By Jeffrey Dastin

Sept 18 (Reuters) - Mantic, an artificial intelligence developer that beat humans in a recent contest for forecasting events, on Friday said it raised $25 million in seed funding.

Results from the summer 2026 Metaculus Cup, an online forecasting tournament that wrapped up this month, showed the London-based startup had assigned probabilities to political, economic and cultural developments more accurately than human competitors.

Its high score and that of other AI entrants marked a first in which technology dominated the competition.

Now, Radical Ventures has led Mantic's funding round at an undisclosed valuation, with backing by Microsoft's venture fund M12, the startup Thinking Machines Lab, Balderton Capital and others.

In an interview, Mantic CEO Toby Shevlane said, "We're now upgrading the level at which humans can understand the future."

The way Mantic works is by specializing frontier AI models from other labs to be better at forecasting. It tests its predictive system on historical data, grades its performance, then improves it, said Shevlane, who co-founded Mantic with Ben Day in 2024.

Shevlane said his previous work as a research scientist at Alphabet's Google DeepMind sparked the idea because he needed help predicting global events relevant to AI.

In the Metaculus Cup, one advantage Mantic had over human forecasters was avoiding a herd mentality, Shevlane said. In one question, humans overwhelmingly bet that pop star Shakira's "Dai Dai" 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, Shevlane said.

Early in the tournament, Mantic also gave Abelardo De La Espriella about a 40% chance of winning Colombia's presidential election, compared with a roughly 30% consensus forecast, Shevlane said. De La Espriella ultimately won. Mantic went on to outperform every human contestant and all but one bot, called laertes, according to the results. 

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. Mantic declined to name its customers.

Hedge funds and trading firms were particularly eager for Mantic's forecasts, Rosenberg said. 

"If Mantic is superhuman as it is, they can make money off of that immediately," he said.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)