Kalshi announced Thursday it completed a $1-billion round of funding at a $40-billion valuation.
The prediction market leader is looking to use the new funding to push beyond event contracts and rival traditional financial exchanges.
- Kalshi was valued at roughly half of its new value just five months ago.
- $1-billion funding round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management.
- Kalshi has already launched non-predicting market products, which it is looking to expand
Although public trading data left no doubt that Kalshi is at the forefront of prediction markets, the new $40-billion valuation is easily the highest amount for any competing company.
This cements Kalshi’s second $1 billion funding round in the last five months. The previous round in May valued the company at $22 billion, meaning the new figure is over 81% higher.
The latest round of funding was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management. Kalshi highlighted Sequoia as a company that also contributed to the May funding round.
Sports event contracts played a significant role in the growing valuation. The summer’s 2026 FIFA World Cup brought prominent options to traders during the traditional “dead period” of American sports, when most leagues are out of action. The company’s busiest day of the World Cup occurred on July 5, when it recorded $608 million in single-day trading volume.
The return of college football and the NFL season also has somehow made those numbers look miniscule. A record trading day on Oct. 24 resulted in $5.1 billion in contracts being bought and sold.
That total was also heavily influenced by the midterm elections, with voting set to take place on Nov. 3. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour recently said that this would be “the first prediction market election,” or the first election during which market data was institutionalized and presented to mainstream audiences.
Kalshi pushes beyond prediction markets
While Kalshi has dominated the prediction market space, it has also shown an interest in expanding beyond the industry.
The company announced its first non-prediction offerings in May with perpetual futures, becoming the first prediction operator to do so. Often called perps, these are derivative contracts that allow users to predict the price of an asset without an expiration date.
Kalshi also noted in additional prediction market news it is looking to build a broader financial exchange. That includes developing leveraged contracts, perpetual futures tied to individual stocks and markets referencing the price of compute – pricing models associated with the cost of digital processing power.
Additionally, Kalshi will use its new supply to invest in its institutional business. The company said in September it worked with 500 institutional entities who, excluding market makers, were responsible for 25% of the platform’s total trading volume.
As the extraordinary growth continues, conversations about Kalshi making an Initial Public Offering (IPO) are ramping up. Mansour previously said that the company wouldn’t seriously consider making that step in 2027, but that was before the company achieved its latest valuation.
“A company of our financial profile with the rate of growth that we’re seeing, that sort of conversation has to happen,” he said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
