To the investors of Manifold:

Top asks

• We’re raising $5m. Reply if you’re interested in participating in our next round.
• Intro me to biz dev people at Reddit.

Thoughts for 2025

• The presidential election has been a huge lift to everyone in the prediction market world. We’ve seen an outpouring of usage (4M views, 100K trades), increased monthly mana sales ($10K → $150K), more investor interest, etc.
• Polymarket, Kalshi, and IB have undeniably performed well during election season. A question I’m often asked is how we see ourselves in relation to the other prediction market platforms. The answer is we’re not trying to build another financial exchange for banks and hedge funds, but a global movement to get everyone on the planet engaged in prediction.
• Mass market adoption is now our focus. Our plan for 2025 is to build a new app focusing on our cash-prize markets on sports, entertainment, and news. We call it the “sportsbook for everything.” Our goal is not just to be the best “prediction market” but the most globally trusted source of real-time odds on every question and to capture our chunk of and expand upon the $115B global sports betting market.
• The incoming Trump administration will likely be much more favorable to prediction markets. We can expect a change of CFTC leadership and deregulation. The precise character this deregulation will take is still highly uncertain, but we expect our sweepstakes model to be a good bet regardless, especially as we plan to host more sports and entertainment content, which the CFTC does not currently permit. (Many large Republican donors operate sportsbooks. Even if the agency deregulates, you can do the math…)
• The Sports Question is interesting. Manifold has historically gone out of its way to not host sports content, given how competitive the sports betting world is. Even with this strategy, sports are still our #3 category in terms of usage (behind politics and tech). At our current stage, it no longer makes sense to avoid it. We will now give our users what they want!
• All businesses need to be thinking about how AI will impact them in 2025. The nature of software has already changed profoundly in just the last year. The Manifold team has gone from using Github Copilot to Cursor + Codebuff and is seeing an ever-increasing fraction of our codebase written by AI. This trend will only continue and means we’ll be able to do more and more while keeping a smaller team.
• Fortunately, Manifold is a remarkably future-proof business. Low-cost AI agents mean it will be easier than ever to spin up new markets and get good pricing on them. As long as knowledge is spread unevenly across the economy, prediction markets will be useful. Human participation is not necessarily required. (I’d even go so far as to say Manifold is a human-agnostic business. I can imagine a world where my successor as CEO, as well as all market creators and traders, are various AIs…)
• Prediction markets thrive on uncertainty. I see several huge tailwinds going into 2025: a possible H5N1 pandemic, the antics of the incoming Trump administration, more AI developments, major geopolitical conflicts in Russia/Ukraine + Middle East, etc. I predict this will drive more traffic to the site than the election did.
• We’re now raising $4mm - $6mm. If you want to be part of the revolution bringing accurate real-time odds on every question to the next billion people, please reply to this email.

Thanks for your support, and may all your bets be in your favor!

Stephen

Cofounder & CEO of Manifold