Prediction market platform Kalshi has announced a $1 billion Series E funding round, valuing the company at a staggering $11 billion. This marks the third funding round for Kalshi in 2025 alone. The latest round was led by Paradigm, with participation from major investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ARK Invest, CapitalG, and Y Combinator.
The impressive valuation follows a record-breaking month in November, where Kalshi's trading volume reached $5.8 billion, a 32% increase from October's $4.4 billion. This surge in activity contributed to a combined trading volume of nearly $10 billion for Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket. The rise in trading volume reflects growing retail interest in prediction markets for assessing real-time sentiment across elections, economic indicators, and global developments.
Kalshi, co-founded by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, has rapidly become a dominant force in the prediction market space. The platform allows users to trade on the likelihood of real-world events, ranging from elections to economic indicators. This latest funding round reportedly makes Mansour and Lopes Lara paper billionaires, each holding a 20% to 25% stake in the company.
The company plans to use the new capital to accelerate consumer adoption, integrate more brokerages, form news partnerships, and broaden its product offerings. Kalshi also intends to expand its reach beyond the U.S., increasing accessibility for users in over 140 countries and enhancing the platform for institutional adoption.
Kalshi faces competition from Polymarket, which recently gained regulatory approval to operate in the U.S. Both companies have been engaged in a race to secure funding. Kalshi's recent valuation places it in a similar tier to Polymarket, which is seeking funding at a valuation between $12 billion and $15 billion.
Kalshi is also venturing into the on-chain economy by tokenizing its prediction markets using the Solana blockchain. This move aims to attract a crypto-native user base and secure liquidity, further intensifying the competition with Polymarket, which is native to the Polygon blockchain. The company is working with Solana-based protocols DFlow and Jupiter to bridge its off-chain order book to Solana's liquidity and launch new Kalshi Builder Codes, enabling users to monetize applications on top of Kalshi's global liquidity pool.
The success of Kalshi and Polymarket has drawn attention from traditional online sports gambling sites like DraftKings and FanDuel, which are now seeking to enter the prediction markets as well.
"Kalshi is replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth," said Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi. "We have created a new way of consuming and engaging with information. It's hard to have an opinion about the future today without thinking about Kalshi".
