News

Kalshi Secures $1 Billion As Prediction Markets Race Heats Up

A surge in capital puts Tarek Mansour’s platform in a tight contest to define event-based trading.

Published

7 months ago

December 8, 2025

kalshi secures $1 billion as prediction markets race heats up

Kalshi has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, a rapid step-up for the prediction-market operator founded by Lebanese entrepreneur Tarek Mansour. Paradigm led the round, joined by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG and several returning investors. The deal lands barely weeks after a $300 million raise at half the valuation.

The cash gives Kalshi fresh weight in an industry moving from curiosity to infrastructure. The company’s profile grew during the 2024 US election cycle, yet most trading today comes from sports. A partnership with CNN is in the works. Kalshi is also building corporate hedging tools aimed at firms exposed to weather shocks or political stoppages — a pitch that pushes prediction markets toward more traditional risk desks.

kalshi prediction market investment

Competition is close. Polymarket is said to be raising at a valuation that could reach $15 billion, a sign that event-based trading is drawing mainstream capital rather than speculative fanfare. The shift is being watched in the Gulf, where demand for pricing tools linked to policy, climate and commodities has edged higher with broader economic reforms.

Mansour’s route into tech was anything but standard. Raised in Lebanon until age 17, he arrived in the US with little sense of Silicon Valley. “We had one shitty computer at home that barely worked,” he told Sourcery earlier this year. After studying engineering and maths at MIT, he worked in equity derivatives at Goldman Sachs and later traded macro at Citadel. At MIT he met co-founder Luana Lopes Lara, who shared a similar turn from academia into quantitative finance. “It was pretty inevitable we would try to build this together,” she told InGame.

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The pair launched Kalshi in 2018 and entered Y Combinator a year later. Early backing from YC, Sequoia, Charles Schwab and Henry Kravis helped turn a research interest into a regulated marketplace offering trades on outcomes across economics, entertainment, sports and weather.

With the new capital, Kalshi plans to scale its consumer markets, deepen ties with institutions and expand enterprise hedging products. The speed of its valuation rise shows how aggressively the sector is forming — and how little room there is for missteps as prediction platforms head toward the financial mainstream.

News

A Three-Clinic Network Bets Dubai Is Ready For Longevity Medicine

Longevium has enlisted nearly 100 clinicians and created an AI platform in a bid to sell biological-age tracking as a medicine, not a wellness service.

Published

2 days ago

July 13, 2026

Dana Saadeh

a three-clinic network bets dubai is ready for longevity medicine

Dubai has been busily creating the scaffolding for a longevity industry, including a dedicated regulatory authority and a health market deep enough to sustain it. Now the clinics are arriving.

Longevium, a longevity clinic network, has opened three locations across the city: a flagship at Triple Seven Mall on Jumeirah 3, and branches in Jumeirah Lake Towers and Jumeirah Village Circle. Together they house a multidisciplinary team of nearly 100 physicians and specialists offering what the company bills as “a measurable medical system for longevity”.

longevity dubai clinic launch

The pitch is that longevity medicine should look less like a wellness menu and more like continuous clinical care. Each patient’s biological age assessment, laboratory results, body composition, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic markers, and lifestyle data feed into a single profile, with a proprietary AI platform helping physicians track progress and adjust protocols against the patient’s own biomarkers.

“Healthy aging must be approached clinically through diagnostics, biomarkers, physician supervision, longitudinal tracking, and protocols tailored to the individual,” said Dr. Ksenia Butova, Longevium’s founder and CEO. “Our goal is to help patients understand their health trajectory before disease develops, and then actively change that trajectory”.

The treatment list spans peptide-based protocols, exosome therapies, stem cell approaches, GLP-1 metabolic optimization, hormone balance programs, cardiovascular prevention, and regenerative aesthetics — a model built for the entrepreneurs, executives, and international patients the clinic says want measurable results rather than generic wellness. A signature offering, Longevity Day, compresses biomarker testing, ultrasound and vascular imaging, specialist consultations, IV therapy, and a personalized optimization roadmap into a single three-hour visit.

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“Here, longevity, biotechnology, AI, prevention, and regenerative medicine are converging into a single ecosystem,” said Butova. “This is why Longevium was built in Dubai, and why we believe the UAE can become a global reference point for longevity medicine”.

The emirate established the Dubai Longevity Authority in 2026 to oversee its longevity, wellness, and advanced health sectors, and the Dubai Health Authority reported insured beneficiaries exceeding 4.9 million in 2025, up around 6.5%, with insurance claims reaching approximately 49.6 million, up around 13.5%.