Kalshi closes $185M round as rival Polymarket reportedly seeks $200M

Kalshi just raised a $185 million round, led by crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm, bringing the company’s valuation to $2 billion post-money, representatives from Paradigm and Kalshi confirmed to TechCrunch.

“Prediction markets remind me of crypto 15 years ago: a new asset class on a path to trillions,” Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm, told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “There’s no better team than Kalshi to scale prediction markets and reshape how people think about everything from elections and economic markets to weather and sports.”

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the round. 

This news comes one day after Bloomberg reported that Kalshi’s biggest but regulatory-troubled rival Polymarket is raising $200 million at around a $1 billion pre-money valuation, led by Founders Fund. That deal is not yet final, sources said. Founders Fund declined to comment.

Prediction markets use blockchain tech to allow users to place bets on the outcome of everything from pop culture events to political ones.

Doing the math, the investors backing Kalshi are paying more of a premium than the ones backing Polymarket, should the latter deal close as reported.

There’s a good reason for that. Polymarket has been banned from the U.S. since 2022 as part of an agreement with U.S. regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

According to Polymarket’s terms of use, a number of other countries and provinces have banned or restricted Polymarket, too. These include the United Kingdom, France, Ontario, Singapore, Poland, Thailand, Belgium, and Taiwan. Regulators argue that these are either betting markets and should be licensed like gambling facilities or they are securities markets and should be regulated as such.

Kalshi, on the other hand, worked through a similar battle with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and came to an agreement to be regulated by the CFTC. U.S. residents may freely use the site.

While a defiant, unregulated market may appeal to those who rail against such things, limited partner investors in venture funds also tend to prefer less risk. 

Still, if Founders Fund does write a big check, that could mean Polymarket is making headway in its hope to end the formal ban under a more crypto-friendly Trump administration. Elon Musk’s X apparently isn’t waiting for that. The two companies announced a partnership deal earlier this month to make Polymarket X’s “official” prediction market, though details of what exactly that entails were scant.​​

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