Mantic Raises $25 Million After Beating Human Punters at Metaculus Cup

The London-based start-up specialising in event forecasting beat all the human competitors in the summer tournament and won over Radical Ventures, M12 and Thinking Machines Lab.

Founded in 2024 by Toby Shevlane, former Google DeepMind researcher, and Ben Day, Mantic has just completed a $25 million seeding tour led by Radical Ventures. Other participants include Microsoft M12, Thinking Machines Lab and Balderton Capital; Aaron Rosenberg of Radical Ventures entered the board of directors.

The company's commercial argument lies in a result achieved this summer at the Metaculus Cup, a forecasting tournament where participants assign probabilities to political, economic and cultural events. Mantic's system ended up in front of all human competitors, behind a single other automated system. This was the first time machines had dominated this event. Among his bets, the model granted 40% of chances to Colombian candidate De La Espriella where the consensus ended at 30% — and he won.

Mantic does not build a foundation model: the team starts from existing models and specializes them on the only task of forecasting, a so-called vertical AI approach. The most obvious customer is hedge funds and trading companies, but companies and public agencies would already use the tool according to their investors.