INFER (formerly Cultivate) vs Cultivate Labs

INFER (INtegrated Forecasting and Estimates of Risk)—originally launched as Foretell by Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in 2020 with seed funding from Open Philanthropy—was created to provide quantitative early-warning signals for U.S. policy and technology decision-makers. The program transitioned to the University of Maryland's Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) under the INFER banner before evolving into the RAND Forecasting Initiative (RFI), operated by the RAND Corporation in partnership with software developer Cultivate Labs.

Operating as a non-monetary, reputation-scored crowdsourced forecasting ecosystem, INFER utilizes Cultivate Labs' enterprise software engine to capture probability distributions on critical policy questions. The platform decomposes complex geopolitical, artificial intelligence, biosecurity, and microelectronics challenges into discrete, measurable indicators. Forecasts are gathered from a hybrid crowd composed of vetted public forecasters, university researchers, and U.S. government analysts, with individual contributions evaluated using strict Brier score calibration.

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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.

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