ELIMINATING GUESSWORK

In the three years since it launched, Scry has predicted over one hundred global events and has clocked an accuracy rating of about 85 percent within a time frame of a year or more for each prediction. “We have predicted events such as the likelihood of impeachments, global recessions, secret nuclear programs or even frequency of nuclear testing,” claims Mr. Jia Huang Ho, co-founder & CMO. Scry aims to provide decisionmakers with accurate, reliable strategic forecasts to aid business decisions.

The company has received funding from an Australian venture capital firm Artesian Ventures, and Hong Kong-based AI-focused accelerator/fund Zeroth. “Honestly though,” admits Mr. Ho, “we (the founders) are still bootstrapping for now, and we have very deep skin in the game.” Scry draws revenues from two products: The first is custom predictions for which companies pay $500 for every required prediction, and the second is an internal forecasting tool, which is an open-platform, whitelisted, private Scry Server that allows companies to make their own predictions with their own employees and stakeholders, instead of using public forecasters. Scry charges for the use of this platform.

Scry focuses on political, economic, geopolitical and financial market predictions. It runs a public, social forecasting site where people can learn and get better at making predictions. Scry clusters the site users using a range of factors including categorical segmenting, timeframe of question, and historical accuracy to identify the ones with the best forecasting abilities.

“From this, we identify predictions that are sound from a statistical point of view, but we go one step further and apply machine learning models to each prediction’s accuracy by weighing 100+ metrics that we track from each user. These include their ‘toxicity’ or how offensive or polite they are, the time they spend on the platform, the factors they take into consideration, their sentiments when they make the response, etc.” The end result, Mr. Ho claims, is a Scry methodology that scores a 20 percent accuracy margin over the public, statistical crowd aggregate.

As a startup, Scry’s methodology has not been subjected to external audits, Mr. Ho admits. “However, every single one of our clients has access to our previous predictions and forecast. We also provide a full transparency report on every single prediction we made historically, including our learning probability, accuracy, and a swing in probability over time.”