Briefs · Entrepreneurship
A Billion Dollars for a Bookmaker That Calls Itself an Exchange
Kalshi has raised another $1 billion, and the price of a bet on the future just went up again.
The prediction-market operator disclosed the round to Reuters on 29 October, at a $40 billion valuation — nearly 82% above the $22 billion set in its Coatue-led round in May, and eight times the roughly $5 billion it was worth in October 2025. Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management co-led, with Tiger Global and Dragoneer also taking part. It is the company’s second billion-dollar raise in roughly five months.
The business is simple to describe and hard to classify. Traders buy contracts on elections, sport, economic data and the weather; a contract at 65 cents implies a 65% probability. Kalshi is federally regulated as an exchange, and it is now pushing beyond event contracts into perpetual futures on crypto, equity indexes and metals, after approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in September.
The courts are not so sure. On 28 October, the day before the announcement, Utah’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its co-founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, calling the sports contracts illegal gambling. Some 20 states have raised similar objections.
Conclusion: Kalshi is not a casino, but rather a market that looks like one — and investors have just paid $1 billion to find out which the law thinks it is.
Read the original at Reuters via Bitcoin.com
Summary in our own words. The original belongs to its publisher.