River Markets secures $8.5 million seed funding to unify institutional prediction trading
Startup River Markets raised $8.5 million in a seed round to build a platform that lets professional traders access multiple prediction markets from a single interface.
River Markets announced a seed financing round of $8.5 million, headed by Haun Ventures and closed in July, with additional backing from Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, Qube Research Technologies and a group of angel investors from firms like Google and JPMorgan. Co-founders Oscar Levy and Antonin Parrot, both former quantitative traders at BlackRock and Morgan Stanley respectively, said the capital will fund new engineers, faster trading infrastructure and a larger sales operation.
Their platform aggregates liquidity across disparate prediction-market exchanges, offering risk-management tools and algorithms designed to curb price volatility from large orders. The initiative arrives as institutional interest in prediction markets surges, exemplified by Kalshi’s reported 800 % rise in institutional volume and recent block trades on Kalshi and Polymarket. Levy expects the system to handle hundreds of millions of dollars in annualized trading volume by year-end. By consolidating fragmented venues, River Markets hopes to give large traders a more efficient way to hedge economic events.
Why it matters
The funding could accelerate institutional adoption of prediction markets, creating new hedging avenues for large investors.
In this story