Kalshi bets World Cup tie-up will boost volumes before IPO

Kalshi lined up official World Cup partnerships with the Argentina Football Association on June 10 and the Croatian Football Federation on June 15 as it tries to turn the 2026 tournament into a volume driver before a public listing. The company also brought Croatia captain and Ballon d’Or winner Luka Modrić on as a featured global ambassador and launched World Cup event contracts on its platform for the tournament.

The push centers on a rare U.S. sports moment: the 2026 FIFA World Cup will be staged in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and it will return to the United States for the first time in 32 years. Kalshi’s market page already lists FIFA World Cup soccer odds and predictions, with active trading in both group-stage and knockout-stage events, a sign that the exchange wants the event to look less like a one-off promotion and more like a sustained trading product.

The timing matters because Kalshi is now being valued and discussed like a much larger financial venue. The company’s annualized revenue has passed $2 billion, its most recent widely reported valuation was $22 billion after a May 2026 funding round, and separate reports on June 24 and June 25 said it was in talks for a new financing round that could value it at roughly $40 billion. Tarek Mansour has also said the company would not go public in 2026, even as early-stage IPO discussions continue.

That valuation leap reflects how aggressively investors are pricing growth in prediction markets, particularly around sports. CNBC has reported that Kalshi processed more than $17 billion in various trading contracts in May and was shifting toward institutional adoption, while broader market reporting has treated World Cup prediction markets as one of the sector’s biggest potential volume engines.

For Kalshi, the appeal of the World Cup is not just branding. The company describes itself as the world’s largest prediction market and a CFTC-regulated exchange, a positioning that sets it apart from sportsbooks while still exposing it to state-level legal and regulatory scrutiny over sports-linked contracts. That distinction will matter more, not less, if Kalshi moves toward an IPO: investors will have to decide whether the business belongs in the financial markets category or in the gambling one, even as the company keeps trying to live in both.