The platform for betting on sports, politics, the weather and more has raised $1 billion and sees big financial firms as a key source of growth.
Since the 2024 presidential election, Kalshi has helped take prediction markets mainstream, as individual users have flocked to its platform to bet on sports, politics and more.
Now the company has raised more money as it seeks to make inroads with major financial institutions.
Kalshi plans to announce on Thursday that it has raised $1 billion in a new round of funding, led by the investment firm Coatue Management, that values the start-up at $22 billion. The round is the company’s third in seven months — each of which roughly doubled the company’s valuation. (The December round made Kalshi’s founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, billionaires on paper.)
The new fund-raising round is the latest sign of fervid investor interest in prediction markets, despite a fusillade of lawsuits from state regulators over their sports betting on the platforms and concern about insider trading.
Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have become big business, as users have flocked to bet on sports, the winner of the latest season of “Survivor,” the high temperature in New York City and more. Kalshi claims about two million users monthly.
That’s reflected in vertiginous growth for Kalshi’s business: The company said its annualized trading volume had hit $178 billion, more than tripling over the past six months. And the company’s annualized revenue, an extrapolation of its current top-line numbers, is more than $1.5 billion.
“Literally, outside of A.I., you don’t see anything growing like that,” Lucas Swisher, Coatue’s co-lead of growth investing, said in an interview.
Yet while Kalshi’s supercharged growth has come primarily from individual users, the company is betting that use by institutional investors — including financial firms like hedge funds and brokerages — will be another avenue of growth.
Last week, Kalshi executed its first custom block trade, a large transaction negotiated off a public market between institutions. And the company said trading volume on its platform from institutional investors had grown 800 percent over the past six months.
