Kalshi has raised $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation, giving the prediction-market company fresh capital to pursue a much bigger goal: becoming a financial exchange that handles far more than bets on real-world events.
Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management co-led the Series G round. The valuation is up about 82% from the $22 billion Kalshi announced in May, when it also raised $1 billion. Few private fintech companies have repriced this quickly.
From Predictions to Perpetuals
Kalshi started with contracts tied to outcomes such as elections, economic indicators and sports. Now it wants a wider menu of things people can trade. The funding is intended to help expand its products for individual traders and institutions.
The shift is already underway. In May, Kalshi announced its first perpetual futures product, moving beyond event contracts. A perpetual future tracks an asset's price without a fixed expiry date, so a trader can keep a position open instead of repeatedly replacing an expiring contract.
That launch had regulatory substance behind it: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual contract on May 29. More recently, Kalshi's own product updates have listed perpetuals tied to a US large-cap index and industrial metals.
Why Wall Street Is Paying Attention
The institutional push predates this round. In May, Kalshi said institutional trading volume had jumped 800% in six months, while annualized trading volume across the platform had risen from $52 billion to $178 billion. Those are company-reported figures, not audited revenue.
Kalshi is building out products and distribution for hedge funds, asset managers and other professional traders. That puts it in a different competitive conversation, one that increasingly includes traditional derivatives exchanges rather than prediction-market rivals alone.
A Big Valuation, a Bigger Test
Its ambition also brings new challenges. Futures can involve leverage, which magnifies losses as well as gains. And Kalshi's event-contract business continues to face legal disputes over where federal derivatives oversight ends and state gambling rules begin.
The question behind the $40 billion valuation is whether Kalshi can convert intense interest in event trading into lasting liquidity across several kinds of financial products. Raising money has made that expansion possible. Building a durable exchange is the harder part.
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