Mantic raises $25M to build AI that predicts the future better than humans

A London-based AI startup called Mantic just closed a $25M seed round to do something deceptively simple: predict what’s going to happen next. Not stock prices in the next five milliseconds. Not tomorrow’s weather. The messy, medium-term stuff, like geopolitical shifts, economic turning points, and the kinds of uncertain events that keep strategists up at night. The round was led by Radical Ventures, with Microsoft’s M12 and Balderton Capital also participating. Beating humans at their own game The company’s calling card is its performance in the Metaculus Cup this past summer. Mantic’s AI system beat every single human participant. It also outperformed nearly all competing bots. Mantic calls its approach “judgmental forecasting.” The term comes from the forecasting literature and refers to predictions that rely on human-style reasoning, research, and judgment rather than purely statistical pattern matching. The company’s system combines this reasoning framework with historical data backtesting, essentially training its models to think the way expert forecasters do, then checking their work against what actually happened. The team behind the predictions Mantic was founded in 2024 b...