Prediction markets are getting serious. Once confined to casual betting, financial institutions now view them as valuable tools to hedge risks and trade on economic events. Yet this fast-growing industry remains scattered across numerous venues. That’s why startup River Markets launched a platform that gives professional traders a single place to trade across multiple prediction markets.
Co-founded by CEO Oscar Levy and CTO Antonin Parrot, River Markets announced Tuesday that it raised $8.5 million in a seed round led by Haun Ventures that closed in July. Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures also participated in the fundraise, along with institutional backers like Qube Research Technologies and angel investors that work at Google, Nvidia, Novig, JPMorgan and Citadel. The founders declined to specify the valuation at which they raised the capital.
“This transition from mainstream retail to institutional can’t really be achieved with today’s consumer interfaces. That’s [why] somebody like us needs to come in and spend the time to make these accessible and familiar for all of these existing institutions and large traders,” Levy told Fortune.
The announcement aligns with a broader industry trend as institutions increasingly view prediction markets as financial tools. Kalshi, one of the industry’s largest platforms, said in May that institutional trading volume on its exchange had increased 800% over the previous six months. The shift is also showing up in the kinds of trades the platforms can handle. In April, Kalshi completed a block trade—a large, privately negotiated deal that lets a firm trade at size without moving prices in the public market—for a Houston environmental hedge fund seeking to trade on the outcome of a California carbon-allowance auction. In June, Polymarket completed a similar deal tied to GPU-rental prices, allowing a firm to hedge its exposure to computing costs.
