Are Kalshi's CNN and CNBC deals worth the $1bn investment?

The first week of December was a gargantuan week for prediction markets in a year full of gargantuan weeks for prediction markets. Kalshi announced another defiantly paradigm-shifting investment in a year peppered with paradigm-shifting investments into prediction markets. The company is now worth $11bn, twice as much as it was valued for the last funding round, less than two months before. Do the two new deals with CNN and CNBC give us a clue as to why?

Kalshi investment and accelerating valuation

Kalshi announced its record investment at the start of October 2025: $300m against a $5bn valuation. Less than two months later, it's another $1bn investment, this time against an $11bn valuation. Now, the fact that another larger investment has come so soon after the last isn't completely unexpected. Right now, there is more public interest in the sector than ever before. Kalshi and others do a very good job at selling the potential of the concept, and there is plenty of money out there that would like to be a part of any potential 'hyper-scaling,' to use the company's own words.

The striking thing is the acceleration of the valuation. It's tricky to precisely estimate how much Kalshi was worth before the Series C funding of June this year ($185m). At the time, those funds were raised against a pre-money company valuation of $1.8bn, recognition of the cultural and regulatory ripples made by its regulator-quaking election contracts and, later, the ever-controversial sports contracts. And 'ever controversial' is right - Kalshi has recently sued another gaming regulator, this time in Connecticut, on the basis that it is already federally regulated by the CFTC. Same story, different district court. It's lucky that in each state where this happens, the results vary slightly, otherwise they would have become so dully repetitive as to be unreportable.

Are investors too confident in sports contracts?

The popularity of sports contracts and the pushback against them are extremely well-reported, and don't need too much restating as we explore where this $11bn has come from. Yes, Kalshi's trading volume is skyrocketing - in October it did $4.4bn. Naturally this excites investors. But there are plenty that dispute the long-term competitiveness of the sector versus sportsbooks. Chad Benyon, an analyst at Macquarie, claims that sell-offs experienced by DraftKings and Flutter because of predictions hype are overdone. He posits that the near-term Total Addressable Market for prediction markets including both sports and non-sports contracts is $5bn. If true, this would not justify the latest Kalshi valuation and would also leave investors pretty exposed if the legal challenges to sports contracts start making dents.

So, while state regulators litigate in a trudging manner towards a perhaps inevitable Supreme Court date, and consumers trade ever more sports contracts, where have these investors found all this clarity on Kalshi's longevity? And if they do have some insight, does it warrant that supersized valuation?

Is Kalshi's added value in media?

Could the answer be in one of CEO Tarek Mansour's wildest claims?

In October's investment announcement, Mansour took the opportunity to drop the additional news that Kalshi would be going live in 140+ countries, to create a single, unified liquidity pool. This time around, the $1bn investment has been dovetailed with the news that Kalshi is integrating with both CNN and CNBC. The shapes of the partnerships are slightly different, but the significance feels the same.

It's not scandalous to suggest that many have sensed disingenuousness in Kalshi's positioning and marketing over the years. Regulators in at least a dozen states think so, as do plaintiffs in multiple ongoing class action suits. One of the more mercurial lines of PR flim-flam has been Mansour's insistence on the prediction-market concept as being a powerful societal tool: "a truth machine." Until now, that phrase has meant little. But, like it or not, these alliances with major broadcasters make it a genuinely investor-relevant point.

Cynics might say that every conceptual use of Kalshi only serves the purpose of channeling more users towards its primary revenue driver: sports contracts. But again, like it or not, these CNN and CNBC broadcasters and journalists are now committed to incorporating Kalshi data into their reportage. The President of CNBC, KC Sullivan, said this of the partnership: "Prediction markets are rapidly shaping how investors and business leaders think about important events, Kalshi's data will serve as a powerful complement to CNBC's reporting and help people stay better informed about the world around them."

You see? That PR is infectious.

Validation from the sports world for sports contracts is one thing, but validation from media for the company's societal meta-capabilities is quite another. Now the precedent is set, there could be many more such deals. We could see a prediction-market ticker become a regular companion to news bulletins across every channel. And how much is truth making worth? $11bn? Much, much more?

How far off is Kalshi's ceiling?

Skepticism about Kalshi taking its place among the furniture of national discourse does not come from an inherent lack of confidence in the product's ability to shape opinions. It will have come from the same source as that which caused people to baulk at the suggestion that prediction markets would surpass sports betting in the US, or Mansour's claim that "the long-term vision is to financialize everything."

These ambitions seemed like marketing hot air designed to inflate the market to its maximum size, which seemed almost certain to fall short of actually achieving those uppermost aims. But the longer it takes for a cap to materialize, the more observers are forced to entertain the possibility of these things, both from a business and societal point of view. These media integrations are manifestations of Kalshi's influence in truth making - Polymarket data is already all over X, it is all becoming tentatively real.

Do integrity fears equal financial instability?

And what could be the consequences? Let's imagine, for a moment, Mansour's world where 'everything' is financialized and one of Kalshi's prime social and commercial functions is as a conveyor of information. Kalshi is of course regulated by the conspicuously hands-off CFTC, and therefore insider trading is illegal, but can this be enforced effectively in this future?

Top-level sport in the US is not exactly a convincing example of this working in practice, and that's in the stringently regulated sports betting world, where every operator is expected to be thorough in policing anomalies. For public organic markets like Kalshi, this is far more difficult. The market could easily shift en masse on the strength of some non-public information. And who's to say then who committed a crime and who was just cannily following the trend?

There's less incentive to police it too - inside information would only serve to make markets more reliable and reinforce Kalshi's reputation as a 'Truth Machine.' And all the while Kalshi's profits are still dictated by the transaction fee, so it's not losing out there either.

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

Kalshi essentially trades in self-fulfilling prophecies. Input market forces and interests into any binary decision and suddenly there's a lot more of an incentive for everyone to drive it to a particular conclusion. From the acquisition of QCEX until last week, Polymarket had been hosting a market asking 'Will Polymarket US go live in 2025?'

This is a perfect example of the reflexive and bamboozling nature of predictions markets. And it could very well be these qualities, channeled through media integrations, that subvert the expectations of prediction-market cynics and see the sector reach the heights promised by evangelists.