As the prediction market surges in the United States, prediction betting platforms are also growing rapidly in size. Kalshi, a leading U.S. prediction betting platform, has seen its corporate value more than double in just five months.
Kalshi said in a news release that it was valued at $22 billion (about 32 trillion won) in a $1 billion new funding round completed on the 7th (local time). When it raised new capital in Dec. last year, its corporate value was about $11 billion (about 16 trillion won), meaning it nearly doubled in just five months.
Tarek Mansour, Kalshi co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), said, "If you set aside artificial intelligence (AI), there are few fields in recent history that have grown at this pace." He added that the prediction market could grow to trillions of dollars, saying, "We are still in the early stages of that shift."
Kalshi has maintained rapid growth since it successfully predicted President Donald Trump's victory during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In particular, Trump's eldest son, Trump Jr., serves as an adviser to Kalshi and Polymarket, among others, keeping close ties with the Trump camp.
The outlook is also bright. The company said its annualized transaction volume has reached $178 billion (about 261 trillion won), more than tripling over the past six months. Annualized revenue based on the current sales trend has also surpassed $1.5 billion (about 2 trillion won).
The growth of prediction betting platforms including Kalshi has been fueled largely by rising demand for sports betting. In fact, about 85% of Kalshi's total trading volume last month was concentrated in sports-related categories. The Financial Times (FT) assessed, "The fact that investors are showing a sudden interest in Kalshi shows the popularity of prediction markets is expanding rapidly."
The market expects prediction platforms to continue growing. Gautam Chhugani, an analyst at U.S. investment bank Bernstein, projected last month that the size of prediction market transactions could reach $1 trillion (about 1,470 trillion won) by 2030. He explained, "Sports-related trading is not the final destination for prediction platforms but a starting point for market entry."
Polymarket, Kalshi's major competitor, is also drawing attention from large investors. In Oct. last year, Polymarket secured up to $2 billion (about 3 trillion won) in investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In that deal, Polymarket's corporate value was estimated at about $8 billion (about 12 trillion won), a sharp increase from the $1 billion (about 1 trillion won) valuation recognized just two months earlier in the Aug. funding round.
Buoyed by this, prediction platforms are expanding their businesses by gradually widening the range of bettable areas. Kalshi said institutional investors are increasingly using prediction markets to manage real-world risks and obtain market signals on future outlooks, and that it plans to invest the newly raised funds in developing products tailored to institutional investor demand.
However, a variable is that efforts to regulate prediction markets are spreading at the level of U.S. local governments. Earlier, Illinois sent suspension orders to prediction platform operators including Kalshi and Polymarket, saying they violated the state's gambling law.
The New York Times (NYT) said, "In recent months, prediction markets have also faced negative public opinion," adding, "Platforms faced fierce criticism after cases emerged of people using advance information to bet on and profit from incidents related to military operations."