Investment keeps flowing into prediction markets.
Kalshi announced today, Friday, Oct. 10, that it has “recently raised” $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion, a figure consistent with earlier reports.
The funding round was led by VC firms Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, with crypto investment firms Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures and several other investment firms also participating. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansur also mentioned actor/comedian Kevin Hart, NBA star Kevin Durant, and Durant’s business partner Rich Kleiman as new investors.
Additionally, Kalshi revealed it has expanded beyond the US, going live in more than 140 countries, a move that deepens liquidity on the prediction market.
The announcements come on the heels of news earlier this week that Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, is investing up to $2 billion in Polymarket, Kalshi’s primary competitor, at a valuation of around $8 billion.
The importance of global liquidity
Insufficient liquidity is a potential shortcoming of prediction markets – for a trade to work, there has to be a buyer and seller. If there are too many sellers and not enough buyers, users flee and volume suffers.
Kalshi’s global expansion figures to have a massive positive impact on liquidity, and the disclosure of the company’s presence in dozens of countries around the world is even more significant than the $300 million financial injection, insiders believe.
Here’s pro trader and publisher of the 50¢ Dollars newsletter Adhi Rajaprabhakaran on X:
“Order flow from the UK and Australia, the two most sports-betting-pilled countries in the world, mixing in the same liquidity pool and order book
“or think of India, whose equity options volume makes up 80% of the global market. …
“hard to overstate how huge this is.”
Taking on Polymarket
While these recent investments value Polymarket as substantially larger than Kalshi, Polymarket’s dominance isn’t quite so pronounced.
Kalshi, in fact, has surpassed Polymarket in weekly trading volume, boosted by its US presence during football season while Polymarket is still not fully live in this country.
And Kalshi is foraying into two areas in which Polymarket has had decisive advantages — global presence and crypto.
In terms of the latter, while Polymarket is a crypto-based platform and Kalshi is fiat-first, Kalshi has bigger plans for the blockchain, with Head of Crypto John Wang calling it the “next phase of Kalshi’s growth.”
Kalshi also now appears to be a player on the world stage, one on which Polymarket has traditionally starred.
Kalshi’s impressive growth
About $872 million was traded on Kalshi last week, its all-time high, and the company projects $50 billion in annualized volume, a colossal increase from around $300 million last year. Kalshi owns about 60% of the global market.
“We have not expected this level of growth,” Mansour told the New York Times.
Polymarket’s US relaunch, though, could slow Kalshi’s growth.
“Kalshi’s annualised trading volume is unlikely to be at that level when Polymarket officially launches in the US,” Sporting Crypto’s Pet Berisha writes on LinkedIn. “That being said, they have so far moved faster than the onchain prediction market.”
