Kalshi, a prediction market based and previously only doing business in the United States, on Friday morning announced that it had expanded to more than 140 countries.
InGame was able to place a bet on Kalshi from the United Kingdom on Friday, even though the U.K. is on a list of restricted jurisdictions in an updated member agreement that was posted early this week. The volume totals and levels of liquidity in the market appeared to suggest that it was indeed the same Kalshi liquidity pool to which U.S. customers have access.
Said a Kalshi release: “This week, Kalshi set a new record in trading volume, with over $1 billion traded on the platform, bringing Kalshi’s annualized volume above $50 billion. In September, Kalshi captured the majority share of global prediction market volume despite only operating in a single country, a rapid rise from a 2% share just one year ago.”
The expansion news came buried in an announcement to customers that Kalshi raised more than $300 million in a just-concluded funding round. Strangely, the release was dated Oct. 7 even though it wasn’t made public until Friday.
The announcement also clarifies what seemed like an odd regulatory notice that Kalshi posted on Monday as an updated member agreement.
In the document, the company announced that it would not accept business from Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Belarus, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, France, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Monaco, Mozambique, Myanmar (Burma), Namibia, Nicaragua, Niger, North Korea, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine (Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions), United Kingdom, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zimbabwe, “or any jurisdiction or territory that is the subject of comprehensive country-wide, territory-wide, or regional economic sanctions imposed by the United States.”
Kalshi dings DraftKings, FanDuel again
Apparently, every time Kalshi sneezes, DraftKings and FanDuel catch a cold. When the upstart prediction market began offering controversial NFL parlays, the stock prices of the top two sportsbooks by market share in the United States plummeted.
Wall Street responded on Friday with a 3% and 0.75% dip in FanDuel and DraftKings stock prices, respectively.
Kalshi’s Series D funding round was led by Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and “significant participation,” according to the release, from returning investor Paradigm. New Kalshi investors include CapitalG, Coinbase Ventures, General Catalyst, and Spark Capital.
Alfred Lin, partner at Sequoia and Kalshi board member, lauded co-founders Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara for Kalshi’s growth.
“Tarek and Luana’s bold vision to make prediction markets mainstream initially drew us to partner with Kalshi in 2020,” he said in a release. “Since then, they’ve built a category-defining company that represents the future of how markets democratize information. We’re excited to deepen our partnership as Kalshi redefines what it means to have an opinion about the future.”
