Mantic Raises $25 Million Seed Round for AI Forecasting
AI startup Mantic has raised $25 million in seed funding in a round led by Radical Ventures, with backing from Microsoft's venture fund M12, Thinking Machines Lab, Balderton Capital and others. The valuation was undisclosed.
The London-based startup specializes frontier AI models from other labs to improve forecasting. It tests its predictive system on historical data, grades its performance, and improves it, according to CEO Toby Shevlane.
Results from the summer 2026 Metaculus Cup, an online forecasting tournament that wrapped up this month, showed Mantic had assigned probabilities to political, economic and cultural developments more accurately than human competitors. Mantic outperformed every human contestant and all but one bot, called laertes. Its high score and that of other AI entrants marked a first in which technology dominated the competition.
Shevlane co-founded Mantic with Ben Day in 2024. 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.
"We're now upgrading the level at which humans can understand the future," Shevlane said.
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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 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.
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 for Mantic's forecasts, Rosenberg said.
"If Mantic is superhuman as it is, they can make money off of that immediately," Rosenberg said.
Mantic declined to name its customers.
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