Lebanese founder Tarek Mansour’s prediction-market startup Kalshi has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, doubling its value in under two months after closing a $300 million round at a $5 billion valuation earlier this year. The latest round was led by Paradigm, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG and several returning investors.
Kalshi became widely known during the 2024 US election cycle, but most of its current trading volume now comes from sports markets. The company is also preparing a partnership with CNN and is expanding into corporate hedging tools that allow businesses to insure against risks such as weather events or government shutdowns. Rival Polymarket is reportedly raising at a valuation between $12 billion and $15 billion, signalling rising investor interest in the category.
Mansour’s journey to this point is far from typical for a Silicon Valley founder. Born in California but raised in Lebanon until age 17, he said he grew up with almost no exposure to the tech world. “We had one shitty computer at home that barely worked,” he told Sourcery earlier this year. “I never even thought that Google was a company. I was very non-entrepreneurial. I knew nothing. I just knew math.”
After moving to the United States for college, Mansour studied electrical engineering and computer science and mathematics at MIT. He later worked in financial trading as an equity derivatives analyst at Goldman Sachs and then as a macro trader at Citadel.
At MIT, he met his future co-founder Luana Lopes Lara, who grew up in Brazil and followed a similar path into quantitative finance. The pair bonded over an academic interest in prediction markets. “The idea of Kalshi organically evolved over three years,” Lopes Lara told InGame. “It was pretty inevitable we would try to build this together.”
The two founded Kalshi in 2018 and were accepted into Y Combinator a year later, attracting early backing from YC, Sequoia Capital, Charles Schwab, Henry Kravis and other prominent investors. Schwab, the individual, is now one of the company’s largest shareholders.
Kalshi’s pitch is straightforward: people and institutions care about how future events unfold, so they should be able to trade on them. The company offers regulated markets that allow users to buy and sell outcomes on everything from economic indicators to entertainment, sports and weather.
With the new funding, Kalshi plans to scale its consumer marketplace, deepen institutional partnerships and build out new categories of risk-based hedging tools for enterprises. The speed of Kalshi’s valuation increase underscores both investor enthusiasm and the growing competition in prediction markets, where the company is now competing head-to-head with Polymarket in one of tech’s most closely watched emerging sectors.
