Mantis Analytics
Kyiv-born AI platform that monitors media, social networks, and messengers in real time to detect disinformation, hostile narratives, and information-space threats for governments and security agencies.
Background
Mantis Analytics was founded in Kyiv in 2022 — by co-founders Maksym Tereshchenko (CEO), Anton Tarasyuk (Expertise Lead), and Ostap Vykhopen (STO) — in the immediate aftermath of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, explicitly to help Ukrainian institutions counter Russian propaganda operations.
The founding team oriented the company toward cognitive-security analytics from day one, with combat-relevant use cases driving early product decisions.
The core product is an AI-powered information-space monitoring platform that ingests feeds from media outlets, social networks, and messaging applications, then applies NLP, LLMs, and big-data pipelines to surface fakes, coordinated manipulation campaigns, and hostile narratives in near-real time.
No separate named product lines have been publicly disclosed beyond this unified platform.
Go-to-market targets government and national-security buyers directly. The company employs more than ten people, with approximately half reported as full-time.
It has participated in the Alchemist Accelerator and received support through Ukraine's Brave1 defense-tech program.
Financial footing
- $240K pre-seed (2024)
- Risk platform w/ New Lines Institute (2025)
- Backers: Nezlamni Fund, Alchemist, ZAS Ventures
Mantis Analytics is private and early-stage. Disclosed funding totals $75,000: a $50,000 seed investment from ZAS Ventures and a $25,000 grant from Brave1, per Vestbee and AIN reporting. A separate Resilience Media report cites a $450,000 pre-seed round; the figure has not been confirmed by a primary financing disclosure and conflicts with the $75,000 figure — the true total raised is reported between $75,000 and $450,000.
The company's own catalog entry references a $240,000 pre-seed figure for 2024, adding a third data point that cannot be independently reconciled. No valuation has been publicly disclosed. No revenue, backlog, or ARR figures are available. The Nezlamni Fund is listed as an investor alongside ZAS Ventures and Alchemist, though the specific round amounts and dates attributed to each have not been confirmed in primary filings.
Major customers & contracts
Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council is the only named government customer on record, with confirmed cooperation reported by multiple Ukrainian tech-press outlets. Mantis Analytics has also disclosed working with several unnamed Ukrainian government agencies. One commercial engagement with an American analytics center was reported as active, with negotiations underway with a second unnamed U.S. analytics organization.
A 2025 partnership with the New Lines Institute — a Washington-based geopolitical risk think tank — was reported as a risk-platform arrangement, though financial terms were not disclosed. Allied ministries of defense have been cited as customers in at least one source, but no specific country, ministry, or contract value has been named publicly. No U.S. Defense Department program office, NATO agency, or named allied MoD contract appears in any available public record.
Leadership & contact surface
Leadership: Maksym Tereshchenko
Competitive position
Mantis Analytics competes in the AI-driven threat-intelligence and narrative-monitoring segment against significantly larger and better-capitalized Western players. Recorded Future (acquired by Mastercard for $2.65 billion in 2024) offers broad threat intelligence with far deeper data integrations and enterprise sales infrastructure — Mantis's edge is its native Ukrainian-language and post-Soviet information-environment expertise, its weakness is scale and brand recognition. Primer.ai targets U.S. defense and intelligence community customers with NLP-driven document and signal analysis; Mantis lacks Primer's SBIR/DoD contract base but operates in theaters Primer has limited ground-level access to.
Blackbird.AI focuses on narrative intelligence and disinformation for corporate and government clients, with U.S.-centric deployment; Mantis is more operationally embedded in active-conflict information environments. Logically (UK-based) and Zignal Labs (U.S.) cover overlapping disinformation-detection ground but neither has demonstrated Mantis's direct integration with a wartime national-security council. The market remains fragmented, with no dominant pan-NATO cognitive-security platform established.
Battlefield relevance
Mantis Analytics was built expressly for the Russia–Ukraine information war and has been used by Ukrainian security institutions to monitor and counter Russian disinformation and propaganda operations since 2022. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine is the confirmed government counterpart. Specific operational deployments, unit designations, detection volumes, or campaign-level outcomes have not been disclosed publicly.
No confirmed use by NATO member militaries, allied special-operations commands, or named intelligence units has been reported. The platform's real-time ingestion of Telegram and other messenger channels is operationally relevant to the Ukrainian information environment, but quantitative battlefield impact data is not available.
Sources & verification
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3dD5jw5Kp4
- https://ecosystem.andorra-startup.com/companies/mantis_analytics/team
- https://www.f6s.com/company/mantis-analytics
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K_aSZpGjbs
- https://en.ain.ua/2023/09/15/ukrainian-mantis-analytics-detects-russian-fakes/
- https://www.drone-directory.com.ua/profile/mantis-analytics/
- https://vestbee.com/insights/articles/ukrainian-ai-startup-mantis-analytics-secures-50k-from-zas-ventures
- https://rubryka.com/en/2024/04/25/shi-startap-mantis-analytics/
- https://24tv.ua/tech/ru/mantis-analytic-ukrainskij-shi-servis-dlja-borby-s-rossijskoj-propagandoj-tehno_n2392513
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWQ2adovqvM
- https://fbi.md/articles/Informational_shift_and_Mantis_Analytics_AI_portfolio_capabilities
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76Ula7AqFG4
- https://resiliencemedia.co/ukrainian-startups-vs-hybrid-threats/
- https://scsp222.substack.com/p/isf-voices-2025-embedding-ai-powered
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antontarasyuk_a-major-milestone-for-mantis-analytics-activity-7386707339476905985-8vTU