Pascal just raised $9 million to prove a technical fix can beat two giants worth a combined $37 billion.
Fortune reported exclusively on July 16 that Pascal, a New York prediction market startup, closed a $9 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures. That's a rounding error next to what its rivals are worth. Kalshi is valued at $22 billion. Polymarket sits at $15 billion. Pascal is picking a fight anyway.
The bet is structural, not financial. Where Polymarket and Kalshi run yes or no contracts that settle when an event resolves, Pascal built its markets closer to perpetual futures, the kind of instrument crypto traders already use to bet on price without an expiration date. Cofounders Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen and Matthew Downey come from trading, not consumer betting. Fortune reported that Crnkovic-Rubsamen previously worked as a quantitative trader at Bridgewater Associates and D.E. Shaw before becoming CEO of dYdX in 2024, while Downey has a high frequency trading background in crypto.
That matters for the product. Pascal says its structure can reduce phantom fills, trades that appear to execute but never actually settle. It also says it can keep fees lower and pay liquidity providers better for showing up and quoting real prices. You don't have to love the jargon to see the point. In markets where serious traders are moving size, a fill that vanishes is not a small annoyance. It changes whether the venue can be trusted.
Pascal launched in June. It's still in private beta. The company won't say how much volume is moving through it. That's a notable silence for a startup asking investors and traders to take its technical edge on faith, but it's also standard practice this early, when a platform is still stress testing before it opens the doors wide.
This isn't Pascal's first check. The Series A builds on a $6 million seed round raised last August from Wintermute Ventures and DBA, two firms with deep roots in crypto market making. That lineage matters. Wintermute is one of the biggest liquidity providers in digital assets, and a bet from its venture arm reads as a vote on execution quality, not just on the prediction market narrative.
The Gap Pascal Is Fighting
Bloomberg reported in May that Kalshi completed a $1 billion Series F led by Coatue at a $22 billion valuation, roughly double the valuation it secured five months earlier. Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley and ARK Invest were also in the round. It didn't stop there. Kalshi is now in talks to raise at a $40 billion valuation, nearly doubling again within months, the New York Business Journal reported in June. That's the scoreboard.
Polymarket's climb is just as blunt. Bloomberg Law reported in April that the company was seeking another $400 million after securing $600 million at a $15 billion valuation the previous month. That's up from $9 billion last year, when Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, took a $1 billion stake. Niche crypto sideshow? Not anymore.
Frankly, that's the kind of capital gap that usually ends the conversation before a startup like Pascal gets a seat at the table. Nine million dollars doesn't buy a Super Bowl ad or a state by state regulatory army. It buys engineering time. And enough runway to prove the settlement problem is real. If it is, the platform with the biggest brand recognition doesn't automatically win the traders who actually move size.
The Opening Is Narrow
The sector itself is why anyone's paying attention. CoinDesk reported in May that Kalshi's annualized trading activity had reached $178 billion, while Pew Research Center data published the same month showed combined monthly volume on Kalshi and Polymarket had grown rapidly since mid-2025. The scrutiny is growing with it. This week alone, reports from the Financial Times, The Guardian and Business Insider put prediction markets back in the headlines over employee trading restrictions, drug trial contracts, flight cancellation markets and criticism from Michael Burry.
That attention cuts both ways. It gives Pascal a reason to exist, because a structural flaw like phantom fills becomes harder to ignore when institutions start looking at event contracts as something more serious than a toy. It also makes the path uglier. Kalshi has the regulatory footprint. Polymarket has the crypto-native brand. Pascal has a product claim and a small pile of fresh capital.
Pascal isn't trying to out market Kalshi or out liquidity Polymarket on day one. It's betting that serious traders, the ones providing the deep liquidity that makes any exchange worth using, care more about whether their fills are real than about brand size. That's a narrow bet. It's also the only bet a nine figure funding gap leaves available.
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