We believe prediction markets will become a global asset class.
Four months ago, we started River Markets to build the financial infrastructure they need to get there.
Today, we are announcing our $8.5M seed round led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, UFO Holdings, Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), TENET, Humbition, Kima Ventures, Cherry Ventures, Stack Asset Management, Perpetual Strategies, Mark Kornfilt, Jacob Fortinsky (Novig), and other amazing angel investors from Citadel, Google, HRT, Tower Research Capital, NVIDIA, FalconX, Exodus Point and JP Morgan.
Prediction markets need financial infrastructure
Event contracts are changing how people trade information, express views on the future, and understand events as they unfold. But while the markets have grown rapidly, the infrastructure used to trade them has not kept pace.
Professional traders operate across fragmented venues, each with separate accounts, balances, APIs, and risk systems. Connecting to a new exchange can take months. Capital sits idle across platforms. Execution and risk must be managed venue by venue.
As traders, we experienced this firsthand. Before starting River Markets, we traded prediction markets ourselves, saw what was needed, and set out to build the infrastructure we wished existed ourselves.
River Markets gives trading firms unified execution and risk across every prediction-market venue through a single platform. Instead of spending months building and maintaining integrations, a desk can start trading in minutes, and benefit from our execution algorithms to move large sizes with minimal slippage.
We launched with trading teams on May 1st, including several of the top 10 traders by volume on Kalshi and Polymarket, and our product is already used by some of the world's leading prediction market hedge funds and proprietary trading firms to access prediction markets through one institutional-grade system.
Execution and risk are live today. Next, we are building the infrastructure and models that will allow firms to use their capital more efficiently and trade at significantly greater scale.
Prediction markets will not mature through better consumer interfaces alone. They need the same financial infrastructure that powers every major market. That is what River Markets is here to build.
For trading firms: If you want institutional access to prediction markets through one unified execution and risk platform, request a demo.
For engineers: If you want to help build the financial infrastructure for this new asset class, view our open roles here.