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This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
At 8PM on election night in New York City, I arrived at an unmarked office building in the Meatpacking District.
Inside, a few dozen young Kalshi employees moved between clusters of desks, pizza boxes, and a large projector displaying live markets for the day’s key races. The vibe was quiet but focused. On the screen, numbers flickered as bets adjusted in real time.
Near the projector, co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara chatted with a CBS News crew filming a segment for the next morning. CBS had just called the Virginia governor’s race. Mansour pointed out that Kalshi’s market had predicted the result almost an hour earlier.
“We’re doing a billion dollars in transaction volume a week now.”
I expected a trading floor atmosphere. Instead, the office felt subdued. “I think it’s quieter than usual because there’s less volatility on this one,” Mansour told me later from a small conference room. The New York mayor’s race had long been priced as a landslide. Zohran Mamdani had held a roughly 95 percent chance of winning on Kalshi (and its rival Polymarket) even before polls closed. Still, about $100 million in trades on the New York race went through Kalshi that day.
In recent months, I’ve been tracking the rise of prediction markets and particularly Kalshi. Despite being federally licensed and much larger than Polymarket, it’s the latter that dominates the conversation in tech circles. Mansour wants to change that.
Kalshi’s betting page for the New York City mayoral election, captured one day after the election.
“Kalshi is arguably one of — maybe the — fastest-growing companies in America this year,” he told me. “We’re doing a billion dollars in transaction volume a week now.” Last year, the company saw just $300 million for the entire year. Mansour declined to share revenue figures, but even at a 1–2 percent fee per trade, the math suggests that business is booming.
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