Kalshi, a New York-based financial exchange and prediction market, has closed a $1 billion Series E round valuing the company at $11 billion. Led by Paradigm, the round saw participation from some of the most influential names in venture capital, including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Meritech Capital, IVP, ARK Invest, Anthos Capital, CapitalG, and Y Combinator. This follows the $185M funding earlier this year.
With fresh capital secured, Kalshi plans to accelerate expansion. The company aims to onboard the next hundred million users by integrating with more brokerages, striking new partnerships with media organisations, and expanding the range of markets available to trade. It also intends to deepen its lead as the safest and most regulated platform in the category.
How was the idea born
Kalshi was founded in 2018 by Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. When Tarek, an Algerian-born quant whiz, met Luana, a Brazilian financial analyst, in college, the two bonded over something unusual, which is a shared obsession with uncertainty.
Years later, that obsession turned into Kalshi, that claims to be the first and only federally regulated prediction market in the US, where people legally trade on real-world events like elections, interest rates, inflation reports, and even the Oscars.
Kalshi built a marketplace where people trade on the outcomes of real-world events. The idea is simple but transformative: instead of reading about elections, economic indicators, sports results, or policy announcements, users can take a position on how these events will unfold. The company effectively transformed public curiosity into a financial instrument, creating a new asset class in the process.
Turning real-world uncertainty into a tradable asset
This shift has changed the way people engage with world events. Instead of being passive observers, millions of users now participate directly by trading their beliefs about the future. Kalshi’s platform has grown into the largest prediction market globally, offering over 3,500 markets and recording weekly trading volumes that now exceed $1 billion, more than 10 times higher than in 2024.
Real-time insight for institutions and the public
Kalshi’s markets have become a pulse check on real-world sentiment. Analysts, reporters, politicians, and investors increasingly monitor the platform because it reflects expectations before headlines do. Its accuracy has drawn attention, particularly after its rapid call of the NYC Mayoral election just eight minutes after polls closed, hours ahead of major media outlets.
This ability to aggregate public belief and real-time data makes prediction markets a valuable tool for understanding what might happen next. For retail traders, it offers a way to express opinions beyond traditional equities or crypto. For professionals from Wall Street to Washington, it offers a temperature check on public expectations.
Fueling the next wave of adoption
As prediction markets evolve from early-adopter fascination to a mainstream financial tool, Kalshi sits at the center of the movement. Its rapid growth suggests one thing: people don’t just want to know the future, they want a stake in it.
“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.”
“Kalshi’s exponential growth shows the scale of latent demand for prediction markets as a new asset class, from institutions to everyday people,” said Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm. “People come for one type of market and stay for the breadth. We see this as an uncapped cultural and economic phenomenon, similar to how we felt about crypto a decade ago.”
