Investment Story — Kalshi
Charles Seely and Kalshi
I'm Charles Seely, and one of the investments people ask me about most is Kalshi. It was a 2019 pre-seed deal I led for SGH Capital, a European venture fund, when I was based in San Francisco covering the US, and what I remember most clearly is that, on the day my partners and I first saw the company, Kalshi was not the one anyone was talking about.
An unfashionable idea at Demo Day
I first came across Kalshi at Y Combinator's Demo Day in March 2019, where I was scouting alongside my partners at SGH Capital. Demo Day is a firehose: dozens of founders, ninety seconds each, and a room of investors already narrowing to the two or three names they'll chase. The founders drawing the biggest crowds that day weren't the ones talking about financial regulation. Kalshi's founders were pitching something that sounded, to most of the room, slow and complicated: a federally regulated exchange where people could legally trade on the outcome of real-world events. Building it meant persuading US regulators to approve an entirely new category of financial contract. Most investors heard "regulatory" and mentally moved on.
Why we leaned in
We heard the same pitch everyone else did, but where the room heard a regulatory slog, we saw the size of the prize: if Kalshi actually cleared that bar, it could be enormous, and the difficulty itself would become the moat. So while others chased the day's hot names, we thought differently, and I followed up to meet Tarek Mansour, one of Kalshi's founders, one-on-one in San Francisco a few days later. I remember that meeting vividly, at Reveille Coffee in North Beach, and not least because it nearly didn't happen. Tarek was stuck in traffic, so we pushed it to later in the afternoon. He was persuasive and impressive, and for me this was as much a bet on him and Luana as on anything else. Partway into the conversation I found myself switching into sales mode and giving him the reasons he should take SGH Capital's money.
The decision
The process moved quickly. The day after the meeting we decided to move on it, and I wrote to Tarek to confirm the offer. Sensing it was getting competitive, I followed up offering introductions to other investors. Four days after our offer Tarek confirmed we were in, and I signed the pre-seed term sheet on behalf of SGH Capital in early April 2019, making us one of Kalshi's first institutional backers, and I managed the investment during my time at SGH.
What that early bet became
Kalshi went on to do exactly the hard thing it set out to do, becoming the leading federally regulated prediction market in the United States. It wasn't a fast or easy path. Progress was slow for years, and the exchange only went live in 2021, the same year Sequoia Capital led its $30 million Series A alongside names like Charles Schwab and KKR's Henry Kravis. The real inflection came in 2024, when a federal court ruling cleared Kalshi to list election contracts and trading volume surged. From there the trajectory was extraordinary: valued at roughly $2 billion in mid-2025, around $11 billion by late 2025, and, as of 2026, about $22 billion after a $1 billion round led by Coatue Management, with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Morgan Stanley and Cathie Wood's ARK Invest among the backers. It has since been reported to be raising again at close to $40 billion. The idea most of the room skipped past in 2019 is now one of the fastest-growing stories in finance.