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.

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.