Novig vs Kalshi

In 2021, Harvard undergraduate Jacob Fortinsky was earning serious profits as a quantitative sharp bettor — until traditional sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel systematically limited his account stakes to pennies. Frustrated by an industry that bans winning customers while charging 8% to 10% hidden house margins (vigorish), Fortinsky teamed up with his computer science classmate Kelechi Ukah to eliminate the house entirely. Their premise was simple: build an institutional-grade financial exchange where sports fans trade spreads and totals directly against each other. After joining Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch, Novig raised a $6.4 million seed round in August 2023 backed by YC founder Paul Graham, NFL legend Joe Montana, and Lux Capital, laying the engineering groundwork for a zero-commission order book.

Novig's path to scale was defined by rapid regulatory pivots. The company initially launched in early 2024 as a state-licensed sportsbook in Colorado, but quickly recognized that state-by-state sports betting licenses were too slow and capital-intensive. In September 2024, Novig radically restructured into a dual-currency sweepstakes platform utilizing "Novig Coins" and "Novig Cash," allowing it to instantly expand across 40 U.S. states, including non-sportsbook giant markets like Texas and California. Trading volume exploded 50-fold, attracting an $18 million Series A led by Forerunner Ventures in August 2025. However, as state attorneys general began launching aggressive legal crackdowns on sweepstakes gambling in late 2025, shutting down operations in New York and New Jersey, Novig faced an existential crisis that threatened to erase its state-level access.

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Tarek Mansour grew up in Algeria and came to MIT on a scholarship. Luana Lopes Lara grew up in Brazil, the daughter of a schoolteacher, and danced at an elite ballet academy affiliated with the Bolshoi before choosing mathematics. They met in an MIT classroom, ended up in many of the same courses, co-authored papers, and interned at the same firms — Mansour at Goldman Sachs and Citadel, Lara at Bridgewater and Citadel. What they observed across those firms was the same thing: an enormous amount of financial decision-making was being driven by opinions about future events, but there was no clean, direct way to trade on those events. You could trade the equity of a company that would be affected by an election result, but you could not trade the election result itself. In 2018, they founded Kalshi to close that gap. The approach was different from every prediction market before them: instead of operating offshore, accepting cryptocurrency, or relying on a fragile regulatory no-action letter, Kalshi would become a fully licensed US exchange. They joined Y Combinator in 2019 and spent the next two years in direct negotiation with the CFTC — a process that had never been completed by a prediction market operator.

The CFTC approval came in November 2020, making Kalshi a Designated Contract Market — the highest regulatory designation available and the same category as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Mansour and Lara were among the youngest founders to win CFTC approval in over a decade. The platform launched its first contract in July 2021. Sequoia Capital led a $30 million Series A. Henry Kissinger and Robert Shiller joined as advisors. The 2024 presidential election was the inflection point: over $800 million was wagered on political markets. When the CFTC under the Biden administration moved to block Kalshi's election markets — arguing they were contrary to the public interest — Lara made the call to sue the federal government. "The only option," she later said, "was to sue." Kalshi won in federal court in September 2024. The ruling opened election markets. Sports markets followed. $238 billion in annual trading volume followed that.

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