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What do you do when you look up and realize that a rival has almost completely stolen your pre-IPO thunder? You ask private equity to justify a silly huge valuation, of course.
Polymarket is reportedly in talks for a fresh fundraising round that would value the company north of $20 billion, according to Bloomberg. If it closes, this would be the second markup in four months. Polymarket previously raised money all the way back in April at a $15 billion valuation, a round that included a $600 million direct investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. That was already a lot of institutional money betting that betting on the future is itself a good bet.
Polymarket told CNBC in late June that its annualized revenue had climbed well above $1 billion following the May launch of its regulated U.S. exchange. Volume backs that up: north of $100 million in daily notional volume domestically, up from roughly $75 million at the end of May, with the international platform running above $150 million a day.
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The real pressure though comes from Kalshi, which closed its own funding round in May at a $22 billion valuation, comfortably ahead of where Polymarket now sits even at the rumored $20 billion mark. The Financial Times reported in June that Kalshi is already back at the table for a third-quarter raise, this time targeting a $40 billion valuation, a number that would formalize Polymarket as the now smaller sibling in a category it arguably invented for retail traders.
Kalshi has spent the past year building the more mainstream, regulator-friendly face of prediction markets, cutting partnerships and racking up the kind of brand recognition that matters enormously once IPO conversations start, and it’s been making exactly that kind of noise lately. Polymarket, for all its volume growth and its blue-chip backer in ICE, risks looking like it’s playing defense in a market it helped create, which explains why it’s digging in at $20 billion as its chief rival sprints toward double that.
Polymarket’s own numbers are genuinely strong, and the prediction-market category keeps growing fast enough that two well-funded players can probably both win for now. But valuation races have a way of becoming self-fulfilling, and right now Kalshi is setting the pace Polymarket can’t seem to match.
