Cultivate Labs was founded in 2014 by Adam Siegel and Ben Roesch in Chicago, growing out of their pioneering work with Inkling Markets—one of the earliest Y Combinator-backed enterprise prediction market engines. In 2015, Cultivate Labs officially acquired Inkling Markets to consolidate its technology stack and pivot toward building next-generation crowdsourced intelligence and internal forecasting software tailored for corporate, military, and sovereign intelligence clients.
Unlike public financial exchanges, Cultivate Labs provides private, permissioned B2B software suites—including Cultivate Forecasts and Cultivate Pulse—that capture internal employee and analyst wisdom behind corporate firewalls. The platform supports binary, categorical, and continuous numeric questions, applying advanced time-weighted and accuracy-weighted aggregation algorithms derived from decade-long IARPA research. To satisfy rigorous security postures, the software offers multi-tenant cloud, private cloud, on-premise, and fully air-gapped deployments for classified national security networks.
Cultivate Labs is best known for powering major government geopolitical forecasting initiatives, most notably the United Kingdom Cabinet Office's "Cosmic Bazaar" cross-government forecasting tournament, as well as multiple deployments across the US Intelligence Community and Department of Defense. In addition to geopolitical foresight, commercial enterprises utilize Cultivate Labs for internal capital allocation, R&D portfolio optimization, product release timeline forecasting, and AI-augmented scenario planning.
- 2005 Inkling Markets Launch Adam Siegel launches Inkling Markets through Y Combinator as an early corporate prediction tool.
- 2014 Cultivate Labs Founded Adam Siegel and Ben Roesch establish Cultivate Labs in Chicago to expand enterprise crowdsourcing.
- 2015 Acquisition of Inkling Markets Cultivate Labs acquires Inkling Markets, consolidating IP and enterprise customer contracts.
- 2018 Cultivate Forecast Engine Deploys advanced Brier-scored probability forecasting suite for defense and intelligence clients.
- 2021 UK "Cosmic Bazaar" Deployment Selected to power the UK Cabinet Office's cross-government geopolitical forecasting tournament.
- 2026 Hybrid AI + Human Forecasting Integration Launches continuous automated LLM forecasters that cross-evaluate live human crowd estimates.
Cultivate Labs was co-founded in 2014 by CEO Adam Siegel and CTO Ben Roesch in Chicago, following their work pioneering enterprise prediction software at Inkling Markets.
Cultivate Labs does not operate a public financial trading venue. Instead, it licenses private, permissioned enterprise software behind company or government firewalls to crowdsource internal predictions securely.
Cosmic Bazaar is a flagship UK government forecasting initiative managed by the Cabinet Office that uses Cultivate Labs software to collect calibrated geopolitical probability forecasts from thousands of civil servants and intelligence analysts.
Yes, Cultivate Labs offers Docker-packaged deployments configured specifically for on-premise and air-gapped security postures, allowing military and intelligence agencies to run isolated instances with no external internet connection.
The platform features automated AI forecasters that monitor real-time news and data streams via LLM ensembles, synthesizing probabilistic estimates that are dynamically combined and accuracy-weighted alongside human crowd inputs.