Kalshi, the prediction market platform co-founded by Lebanese-American entrepreneur Tarek Mansour, has raised more than $1 billion in a new funding round led by Coatue Management at a $22 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, doubling the company's value from its previous $1 billion raise in December led by Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and CapitalG.
The round marks the third time in under a year that Kalshi's valuation has roughly doubled, from $5 billion earlier in 2025 to $11 billion in December to $22 billion now. Monthly trading volume hit $10.4 billion in February, up 11 times over six months, and annualised revenue has reached $1.5 billion according to Bloomberg.
The new capital arrives at a moment of sharp tension. While investor appetite is clearly accelerating, Kalshi is simultaneously facing regulatory pushback from state-level authorities across more than a dozen jurisdictions.
Last week the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Kalshi's attempt to block a temporary restraining order from Nevada, clearing the way for a ban on its operations in the state. On the same day, Arizona charged the company with 20 criminal counts, accusing it of operating an illegal gambling business and offering election wagering.
The company also disclosed last month that it had uncovered and penalised two users for insider trading, including an editor for social media creator MrBeast, and revealed more than a dozen active cases among roughly 200 it had investigated.
Speaking on the Cheeky Pint podcast with Stripe co-founder John Collison and Sequoia's Matt Huang last week, Mansour and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara described the decision to sue the CFTC (their own regulator) as the defining inflection point of the company.
The regulator had blocked election contracts twice, in 2022 and again in 2023, and most of the team and investors had stopped believing the strategy could work. "Our message in that next stand-up was actually, 'Guys, here's the 2023 strategy, we're going to try again,'" Mansour said. "Even though every inch of evidence was pointed in the other direction."
When the second attempt was also blocked, Lopes Lara pushed to sue. "At the beginning it was like, this is crazy," Mansour said. The board's response, he recalled, was that it was "an anti-pattern, it's a bad idea, but a lot of great companies are built by an anti-pattern. There's something off. That is weird. That happens and maybe this is yours."
The lawsuit, filed at the end of 2023, succeeded in late 2024, and the company exploded. Kalshi went from a modest regulated exchange trading economic indicators to a platform processing over $10 billion a month in contracts spanning politics, sports, crypto, culture, economic data and more.
One of the more revealing details from the conversation was the structure of Kalshi's liquidity. Lopes Lara noted that fewer than 5% of matched orders on the platform come from traditional institutional market makers, with the overwhelming majority driven by what the company describes as a distributed network of over 2,000 individual superforecasters and small trading operations.
Mansour cited a tax accountant in Kansas who had never traded financial markets before becoming one of Kalshi's best inflation forecasters, and a user who recently made a large directional bet against DOGE's cost-cutting targets after reading through the relevant tax codes and statutes, winning what Mansour compared to a "Big Short" trade.
Lopes Lara's favourite user, she said, is an Ariana Grande superfan who has made over $150,000 trading Billboard chart markets, using the proceeds to pay off student loans, fund a master's degree and buy a car.
On the question of AI-driven trading, Mansour confirmed that agentic trading through the API is growing, and that the company has launched Kalshi Research to work with AI labs on creating benchmarks around which models can best predict future events, a test he framed as potentially measuring whether AI systems are developing real understanding of the world beyond pattern memorisation.
Mansour, who was born in California but raised in Lebanon until age 17, has said he grew up with almost no exposure to the tech world. After moving to the US for college he studied electrical engineering, computer science and mathematics at MIT, then worked as an equity derivatives analyst at Goldman Sachs and a macro trader at Citadel.
At MIT he met Lopes Lara, who grew up in Brazil and followed a similar path into quantitative finance. They founded Kalshi in 2018, were accepted into Y Combinator in 2019 and spent three years fighting for regulatory approval before launching in 2022 as the first CFTC-regulated prediction market in the US.
FWDstart included Mansour in its MENA Diaspora 50 earlier this year.
