Kalshi, founded in 2018 by MIT graduates Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, operates the first CFTC-regulated prediction market exchange in the United States. The platform lets users trade contracts on the outcomes of real-world events, including economic indicators, weather, politics, and culture, turning forecasts into tradable assets. Kalshi increasingly leans on AI and data infrastructure for market design, pricing, and surveillance, and has become a barometer of crowd-sourced probability for everything from rate decisions to elections. After explosive consumer growth, Kalshi raised a $1B Series E in December 2025 at an $11B valuation led by Paradigm, with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, ARK Invest, and CapitalG participating, vaulting it into the upper tier of fintech and prediction-market startups.