Kalshi raises $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation, days after Utah charged it with crimes

Kalshi, the US prediction market regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said on Thursday 29 October 2026 that it has raised $1 billion in a Series G round at a $40 billion post-money valuation. Wellington and Sequoia co-led the round, according to Kalshi’s own announcement, which lists ten other investors. The new Kalshi valuation is about 82% above the $22 billion it reached in May, when it raised another $1 billion, Bitcoin.com News reported, citing Reuters.

The timing is awkward for a company asking investors to price its future. In the nine days before the announcement, the state of Utah sued Kalshi in civil court, the federal government and the CFTC sued Utah to stop that case, and Utah’s attorney general then filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its two co-founders. Kalshi announced the round the next day.

“Today, we’re announcing a $1 billion Series G at a $40 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Wellington and Sequoia,” the company wrote in the post, which carries no named author. It does not mention Utah, the CFTC lawsuit or any state case.

Kalshi used the announcement to publish a set of business figures: over $1 billion in annualized revenue from markets other than sports, annualized trading volume above $1 trillion and, for crypto readers, about $140 billion a year of trading in crypto contracts. All of these are the company’s own numbers. Kalshi did not give a total revenue figure, a profit figure or audited accounts.

Kalshi valuation: from about $5 billion to $40 billion in a year

Kalshi has been valued four times in roughly twelve months, each one roughly double the last. Bitcoin.com News puts the valuation at about $5 billion in October 2025 and $11 billion in December 2025. In May 2026 Kalshi raised a $1 billion Series F led by Coatue at $22 billion, a round reported by both Cointelegraph and Bitcoin.com. The Block reported that participants in that round included Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), IVP, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley and Ark Invest.

Sources: Kalshi for the Series G; Cointelegraph and Bitcoin.com News (29 October 2026) for the earlier rounds. The October and December 2025 figures come from press reports, not from Kalshi.

A filing gave an early look at the May money. A Form D reviewed by The Block on 26 August showed $1.12 billion of equity sold since 3 April 2026, out of an offering of nearly $1.5 billion. The Block said the total may include the Series F.

The price had been in the press for four months. On 24 June the Financial Times reported, and The Block relayed, that Kalshi was in talks at a $40 billion valuation, with a close possible as early as the third quarter. In mid-August The Information reported advanced talks with Sequoia and Wellington for at least $750 million, which would be Wellington’s first investment in Kalshi. Cointelegraph says the $1 billion size was first reported in September. The deal came in October, later than the FT’s window, and the final size and the round letter, Series G, are the ones in Kalshi’s post.

Who invested: twelve names, and two that are missing

Beyond the two co-leads, Kalshi names ten co-investors: Baillie Gifford, Stripes, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Layer Global, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Sequoia Global Equities, CapitalG, Hudson River Trading and Balyasny Asset Management. Coatue led the May round and Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz took part in it, according to The Block, so part of this money comes from existing backers buying in again at a valuation almost twice the one they paid five months ago.

Bitcoin.com News, citing Reuters, wrote that Tiger Global Management and Dragoneer also took part. Neither firm appears in Kalshi’s own list, Cointelegraph does not name them, and Coindaro could not confirm that either invested. Until Kalshi or the two firms say so, their participation is a press report only. Kalshi did not say how much any investor put in.

What Kalshi says it trades and earns

The announcement is as much a sales document as a funding notice. It lists growth by business line, all annualized, which means a recent period scaled up to a full year. That method flatters a business growing fast, and none of the figures has been audited or checked by a third party.

Two outside figures help put this in proportion. Cointelegraph cites about $15.8 billion of Kalshi trading over 30 days, based on DefiLlama data. Bitcoin.com News gives Kalshi a market share of about 72% in the third quarter of 2026, a little below the “over 75%” Kalshi claims for itself. The two sets of numbers are measured differently and over different periods, so they should not be read as a direct check on each other.

Sports still pays a large share of the bills

The headline revenue number covers only markets that are not sports. Cointelegraph, which also cites The Wall Street Journal for that figure, notes that at the May round Kalshi reported an annualized revenue run rate above $1.5 billion for the whole business. Bitcoin.com News reported that sports made up about 65% of revenue at certain points. Kalshi did not publish an up-to-date total, so the size of the sports business, the one at the centre of every state lawsuit, is not known from this announcement.

Leading with non-sports revenue lets Kalshi show investors a business that would survive if some states won. Politics, commodities and crypto are the lines it puts forward, and none of them is named in the Utah cases.

Crypto is a $140 billion line for Kalshi, without a token

The $140 billion figure does not mean Kalshi holds that much in coins, and Coindaro found no Kalshi token and no blockchain role in this raise. The crypto business is made of contracts on crypto prices: event contracts such as “will bitcoin be above a given level at a given time”, and since a few months ago perpetual futures. Kalshi says those perpetuals have done $83 billion of volume with more than 500,000 traders.

A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry date. Its price is kept close to the spot price by a funding payment that one side pays the other at regular intervals, and traders can use leverage. That makes perpetuals much riskier than buying the coin itself: a small move against a leveraged position can wipe out the margin.

Kalshi has said it will let traders borrow against bitcoin to margin those perpetuals, but, as we reported in our piece on Kalshi’s bitcoin margin plan, it set no rate, loan-to-value ratio or start date at the time. Short-dated contracts are a large part of the activity. A Bloomberg newsletter put crypto event contracts on Kalshi and Polymarket at $2.7 billion of notional volume in one week in October, mostly 15-minute up-or-down bets on bitcoin, a figure Coindaro could not check against a public dataset.

Kalshi also has a foot on-chain. On 1 December 2025 it began offering tokenized versions of thousands of its markets on Solana, working with the Solana protocols DFlow and Jupiter, and added builder codes so developers can earn from apps built on its liquidity, The Block reported. On 12 December 2025 the Phantom wallet added those tokenized positions, bought with SOL or the CASH stablecoin, and on 23 October 2026 it opened Kalshi markets to users in the United States.

None of this makes Kalshi a crypto company in the way Polymarket is. Its core is a CFTC-regulated exchange that settles in dollars. Crypto is a product line, and on Kalshi’s own numbers a large one: about one seventh of the trillion-dollar annualized volume it claims.

The legal fight behind the money: Utah charges and the CFTC suit

The round was announced at the end of the most crowded legal stretch in Kalshi’s history. Utah sued Kalshi and two Susquehanna firms in civil court on 20 October, arguing that the market maker acts as the house. On 27 October the United States and the CFTC announced a federal suit asking a judge to stop Utah’s enforcement against Kalshi, as told in our report on the US and CFTC lawsuit against Utah.

Then, in a charging document dated 28 October, Utah’s attorney general filed 14 criminal counts against KalshiEX LLC, with co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara named as co-defendants. The case rests on twelve sports bets of $4 to $30 placed by an undercover state agent, as detailed in our report on the Utah criminal charges. The charges are accusations; Kalshi called them an overreach and said it would fight them in court.

The core dispute is the same in every case. Kalshi says its sports contracts are swaps under federal derivatives law, overseen only by the CFTC. States say they are bets under state gambling law. Some appellate rulings have gone the states’ way, Bitcoin.com News noted, and Mansour has suggested the question could end up at the Supreme Court.

On Monday 26 October the NBA named Kalshi and Polymarket as its “preferred prediction market exchanges”, Cointelegraph reported, a sign that at least one major league now prefers to work with the platforms rather than against them.

None of the investors has said publicly how they weighed the legal risk, and Kalshi’s post does not raise it. The price leaves two readings: the lead investors expect federal law to prevail, or they value the non-sports business at that level even if some states keep sports contracts out.

Kalshi valuation vs Polymarket

Kalshi’s main rival is Polymarket, a crypto-native platform backed by ICE. Polymarket’s own valuation is known only from press reports, and none of them comes from this week.

• In October 2025, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket at about $8 billion before the money, or about $9 billion after, The Block reported.
• In April 2026, Polymarket was seeking $400 million more at about $15 billion, according to a report relayed by Dealroom on 22 April. A later Finance Magnates report, citing Bloomberg, said the round closed with D.E. Shaw and G Squared as new investors.
• In August 2026, Polymarket was reported to be in early talks to raise about $1 billion at more than $20 billion. No report found by Coindaro says that round has closed.

On those reports, Kalshi is now valued at more than twice Polymarket’s last closed price. The comparison has limits: Polymarket’s figures are secondhand and months old, while Kalshi’s come from its own post this week. More on the rival’s model is in our Polymarket project page.

Where Kalshi says the $1 billion will go

Kalshi says it will use the capital to grow the exchange, add new assets and widen access. The post names four directions:

• New products: indices built with S&P on prediction markets, single-stock perpetual futures and markets on the price of computing power.
• Institutional sales, distribution and product development, building on the roughly 500 institutions it says were active in September.
• Growth of its prediction markets business and of institutional adoption.
• International expansion, with a focus on Latin America and Europe.

Kalshi also lists the partners already plugged into its markets: Interactive Brokers, Marex, Clear Street, Cantor Fitzgerald, S&P, Nasdaq, Stripe, Public.com, Plus500, Wealthsimple, Alpaca, PayPal and Block. Bitcoin.com News adds that Kalshi has expanded into equity indexes and metals, and plans leveraged event contracts.

For European readers, the word Europe is the only detail. Kalshi did not name a country, a regulator or a licence, and Coindaro found no source on a filing in France, Italy or any other EU state. Sports betting in France and Italy is licensed nationally, and Kalshi has said nothing about how its sports contracts would be treated there or how it plans to enter.

An IPO is not on the table for now. Mansour ruled out a listing in 2026, according to Bitcoin.com News; later commentary points to 2027 or 2028, but no date has been set by the company.

What the announcement leaves out

Several basic numbers are missing. Kalshi gave no total revenue, only the non-sports figure, and no profit or loss. It did not say whether part of the money will pay for its legal defence in Utah and other states, or how much each investor put in. Whether Tiger Global and Dragoneer invested at all is unconfirmed: one outlet reported it, citing Reuters, and Kalshi’s list leaves them out.

The next dates will come from the courts. No hearing has been reported yet in the federal suit against Utah (case 2:26-cv-01055) or in the criminal case in the Third Judicial District Court in Salt Lake County, where, FOX 13 reported, the founders were issued summonses. A ruling on whether sports contracts are swaps or bets would bear on the business that, at certain points, brought in about 65% of Kalshi’s revenue, according to Bitcoin.com News.