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Kalshi, the prediction market co-founded by Brazilian billionaire Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour, is in talks to raise new money at a $65 billion valuation, barely two weeks after a funding round that valued it at $40 billion.
A person familiar with the matter confirmed the talks on Nov. 12. The size of the new raise and the investors involved were not made public, and Kalshi has not commented. The money would help fund a platform for trading compute futures, contracts tied to the rental price of graphics processors and cloud computing capacity.
A $65 billion valuation would be 62.5% above the level set in late October and almost triple the $22 billion valuation from May.
Back-to-back funding rounds
Kalshi said on Oct. 29 that it had raised $1 billion at a $40 billion post-money valuation in a round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management, with Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Morgan Stanley Investment Management among other investors. That followed a $1 billion round led by Coatue in May at $22 billion. In December 2025, the company raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation.
The company says it handles more than $1 trillion in annualized trading volume and earns more than $1 billion in annualized revenue from markets outside sports. It has not published profit figures. The October round was expected to be Kalshi's last private raise before a possible initial public offering.
Kalshi named compute markets among its planned launches in October, alongside financial indexes and single-stock perpetual futures. It is competing with CME Group Inc. and Intercontinental Exchange Inc., which are both preparing GPU rental-price futures. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has extended its review of such contracts over concerns about manipulation of the benchmarks they track, which could push trading into early 2027.
Legal fights continue
The funding talks come as Kalshi fights state officials over whether its sports contracts amount to illegal gambling. Utah prosecutors filed criminal charges on Oct. 29 against the company's exchange unit and both founders, and Louisiana sued Kalshi and other prediction markets this month. Kalshi, which is regulated by the CFTC, argues that federal commodities law overrides state gambling rules.
Lopes Lara and Mansour met as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded Kalshi in 2018. Mansour, who grew up in Lebanon, is chief executive officer, and Lopes Lara, a former ballet dancer from Brazil, is chief operating officer.
Forbes added both to its billionaires list in December 2025 after the $11 billion round and named Lopes Lara the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire. Their fortunes have climbed with each round since.
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