Novig went into its first full NFL season carrying a $500 million valuation, more than $105 million in outside funding, federal approval to run a prediction market, and over $125 million in trading volume from its opening week under the new structure. The New York company has signed the Mets, used LIV Golf for an earlier activation, and put Sydney Sweeney on its cap table for a national advertising campaign. Every contract on the platform is about sports, which makes the market it wants considerably narrower than what Kalshi and Polymarket are chasing.
Those two processed a combined $48.4 billion in trading volume during August according to figures reported by Reuters, so Novig sits nowhere near the companies currently dominating prediction markets. Election, economic, weather, entertainment, and geopolitical markets aren’t needed to compete for the same sports customers, though. Novig’s product, marketing, partnerships, fee structure, and regulatory strategy all point at an area where US sportsbooks already proved the consumer demand is enormous.
Jacob Fortinsky and Kelechi Ukah met through poker games at Harvard and started building Novig there in 2021. Fortinsky studied philosophy, politics, and economics and had worked in investment banking, while Ukah studied physics and mathematics with stints at quantitative trading firm Jane Street and CERN. Fortinsky has said his interest in building the company came from watching successful sports bettors get limited or thrown off conventional sportsbooks, and he’d already traded stocks, foreign exchange, options, and prediction markets before turning to sports.
The name refers to the “vig,” or vigorish, baked into traditional sportsbook pricing. The original business let customers trade against each other through an exchange instead of taking fixed odds from a bookmaker, with Ukah building much of the infrastructure and bringing quantitative trading and physics research into a product designed like a financial exchange. Making money from institutional traders, data, and internal market making while leaving most retail peer-to-peer trades commission-free was the plan Novig described in 2023, which already put it a long way from the conventional sportsbook model.
Y Combinator took Novig into its accelerator before a $6.4 million seed round in 2023 led by Lux Capital, with Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Innospark Ventures, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, investor Paul Graham, and NFL Hall of Famer Joe Montana among the other backers. A 10-year market-access agreement with Full House Resorts and its Bronco Billy’s Casino property opened the door to Colorado. That August, a beta test ran 200 users through 15,500 orders across 1,290 markets, giving the company an early look at whether an exchange could hold enough orders for customers to find counterparties at all.
Novig launched its regulated sports betting exchange in Colorado in January 2024, and state gambling regulation promptly got in the way. Fortinsky later said much of the peer-to-peer and social functionality couldn’t be deployed under that setup, while state-by-state licensing kept liquidity separated between jurisdictions. An exchange gets considerably less useful when every state puts another wall between potential buyers and sellers.
Novig closed the Colorado exchange and launched a sweepstakes product using Novig Coins and redeemable Novig Cash, which reached more than 40 states without a conventional sportsbook license in any of them and pooled customers into a single product. Monthly trading volume had grown almost 100-fold since launch by August 2025, with annualized Novig Cash volume past $2 billion and more than 90% of trades peer-to-peer, against much heavier use of company-supplied liquidity in the early stages.
Forerunner led an $18 million Series A in 2025 with Y Combinator, NFX, Perceptive Ventures, and Gaingels taking part, and Pantera Capital led a $75 million Series B in February 2026 alongside Multicoin Capital, Makers Fund, Edge Equity, Forerunner, NFX, and Perceptive. Total funding passed $105 million at a $500 million valuation, and Fortinsky said the platform had over 100,000 traders and had grown volume more than tenfold during 2025, to an annualized $4 billion.
Crypto-focused investors supplied much of that Series B despite Novig being a sports company. Pantera and Multicoin have spent years in digital assets and blockchain businesses, which gave Novig backers who understand exchanges, market liquidity, and products where users trade directly with one another. Headcount passed 50 by February across engineering, exchange operations, market structure, and sports trading, while the company prepared to swap sweepstakes for federal regulation.
Ludlow Exchange, the Novig subsidiary behind its regulated market, received Designated Contract Market status from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on June 16, six months after applying. DCMs are federally regulated exchanges and have to satisfy CFTC requirements covering market surveillance, manipulation prevention, financial resources, participant protection, disciplinary procedures, recordkeeping, and system safeguards.
Real-money event contracts replaced the sweepstakes structure on Aug. 4, with the platform open to customers aged 21 and older across most of the United States, minus Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona. One exchange now covers every eligible state, instead of a separate sportsbook operation built and maintained in each one.
Getting to a national footprint through state licenses would have meant market access deals, regulatory approvals, technology certification, and separate operations state by state, which is the reason a company this young can contemplate competing with established sportsbooks at all. Pooling customers from multiple states into one exchange also grows the number of traders available to take the other side of an order, so distribution and liquidity improve together.
Novig contracts trade between zero and $1 and settle at $1 when the chosen outcome happens. Customers can take prices already sitting in the market or submit their own orders, with prices moving as other traders buy and sell, so the counterparty is generally another participant rather than a sportsbook setting a fixed line and taking the opposite side of everything.
Pre-game straight trades carry no fee on either the consumer platform or the API, and makers pay no transaction fee across the other products either. Takers pay on live straight markets, most futures, and parlays, with the fee calculated from the contract price and number of contracts, so 100 live contracts at a 50-cent price come with a 75-cent fee. Parlays use a higher coefficient and fold the charge into the quoted price.
Market makers earn credits worth 50% of the taker fee on qualifying live trades, which gives traders a reason to leave orders on the book where other customers can hit them immediately. Earlier versions of Novig had the company itself providing liquidity whenever customer activity fell short, and the current structure leans on maker incentives and outside liquidity to keep the regulated order books moving.
More than $125 million in notional contracts were traded during the first week after launch, with the busiest day at $26.3 million and parlays accounting for around a third of the activity. Novig said its opening sports volume beat the comparable first weeks of Kalshi, Polymarket US, Underdog, and DraftKings’ exchange, though those figures come from Novig itself and say little about where volumes settle once the launch period ends.
The New York Mets named Novig their exclusive official prediction market partner on July 30, becoming the first individual MLB franchise to sign such an agreement. The multi-year deal covers Citi Field signage, broadcast exposure, digital content, and in-game activations, and Novig separately became an MLB Authorized Prediction Market, which gives it official league data under the integrity framework built for prediction exchanges.
LIV Golf had opened an earlier route into professional sports in April, with seven players including Jon Rahm, Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, Cameron Smith, and Tyrrell Hatton wearing Novig branding through the first major championship window of the season. Tournament-specific markets and a 500,000 Novig Cash contest came with the short-term activation.
Sydney Sweeney became a strategic partner and equity holder on Sept. 9, alongside Novig’s first national advertising campaign. Her ownership percentage and compensation haven’t been disclosed, and Fortinsky told Front Office Sports that Sweeney approached the company about an equity arrangement and helped develop the campaign. The ad pulled millions of views within hours by featuring Sweeney nude and covered with sports equipment while hammering the sports-only product.
Fortinsky said Novig chose the campaign as one concentrated marketing expense ahead of football season rather than trying to win every sponsorship auction against better-funded rivals, and that it would eat the bulk of the company’s marketing spending going into the season. Polymarket has signed LeBron James and a long list of other athletes and celebrities in the same period, while Kalshi has been collecting league and team agreements.
Refusing to offer markets on politics, wars, deaths, and celebrity events gives that spending a specific message. Kalshi and Polymarket both run broad event exchanges covering sports plus numerous other categories, leaving Novig free to market itself directly at people who would otherwise use a sportsbook. Sweeney’s campaign says so outright, and Fortinsky said her interest in the company came partly from discomfort with the celebrity-focused contracts available elsewhere.
Kalshi alone generated about $40 billion of trading volume during August, and the two leaders together reached $48.4 billion, per Reuters. Kalshi raised $1 billion earlier this year at a $22 billion valuation, while Polymarket has been exploring another round above $20 billion. Novig’s $500 million valuation is a small fraction of either.
Sports being Novig’s only category cuts down how many fronts it fights on, but sports is already one of the main sources of prediction-market volume. Kalshi and Polymarket have spent heavily on data, league rights, teams, athletes, and customer acquisition, while conventional gambling companies and financial platforms keep moving into event contracts. Novig will need sustained liquidity and enough fee-paying activity to support the exchange once promotional spending and venture capital stop standing in for operating income.
Demand clearly exists after a $125 million opening week, though scale next to the market leaders is another question. A meaningful chunk of that volume came from parlays, which helps revenue under the current fee schedule, and free pre-game straight trading could pull in customers who care about sportsbook margins. Full NFL, NBA, NHL, and college seasons will show whether those customers stay once the novelty of a nationwide launch wears off.
Ludlow Exchange sued officials in New York, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Washington, and Wisconsin within two weeks of launching the federal platform. Novig wants rulings that federal commodities law gives the CFTC exclusive authority over its event contracts and stops those states from treating the products as unlicensed sports gambling. The Wisconsin case was filed Aug. 14, and the New York action began the same day as the national launch.
New Jersey has separately asked the US Supreme Court to decide whether states can regulate sports event contracts offered by federally registered prediction markets, in a case involving Kalshi. Federal courts have reached conflicting conclusions in similar disputes, and a ruling could hit Novig even though it isn’t the defendant there. A decision strengthening state authority would push prediction markets back toward the state-by-state licensing structure Novig spent years trying to move beyond.
Novig now has more than $105 million in funding, a federally registered exchange, a $500 million valuation, a major-market MLB partnership, and a national ad campaign fronted by an equity-holding celebrity. Its scale stays small beside Kalshi and Polymarket, and the company hasn’t disclosed revenue or profitability, though it no longer has to prove that a third sports prediction exchange can attract trading activity. Turning that activity into recurring fee revenue, keeping liquidity deep enough for competitive prices, acquiring customers without matching its rivals dollar for dollar, and surviving the state-versus-federal fight hanging over the whole US sports prediction market are what comes next.