Key Takeaways
- Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital previously invested $200 million in Polymarket before this new $300M round.
- The new round would value Polymarket at $21 billion, up from a fraction of that in 2025.
- Rival Kalshi already hit a $22 billion valuation in May after its own $1B raise.
Doubling Down, Again
This isn’t 1789 Capital’s first bet on Polymarket, and it won’t surprise anyone who has watched the fund’s involvement build over the past year. Trump Jr.’s firm first disclosed a “double-digit millions” investment in the platform in August 2025, back when Polymarket was still working through U.S. regulatory limbo and had yet to acquire the CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange that eventually cleared its path back into the American market.
Since then, 1789 Capital reportedly built its stake up to around $200 million. Now it’s adding roughly $300 million more, according to WSJ, as part of a funding round that totals close to $1 billion and would push Polymarket’s valuation to about $21 billion.
That’s an extraordinary trajectory for a platform that, by some accounts, was valued in the low hundreds of millions when 1789 Capital first got involved. Few venture bets in crypto have compounded this fast, and fewer still carry a name as politically loaded as Trump Jr.’s attached to them.
The Trump Jr. Connection and the Legal Backdrop
Trump Jr. isn’t a passive investor here, given he’s also joined Polymarket’s advisory board. As a result, his fund has a direct hand in shaping the platform’s strategy as it fights a messy legal battle on multiple fronts. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) maintains it has exclusive federal authority over event contracts, while at least 20 states have pushed back through litigation, arguing prediction markets tied to sports and elections amount to gambling under state law.
At a recent event, Trump Jr. pushed the industry’s preferred posturing directly, describing prediction platforms as already “overseen by federal officials, not state attorneys general” and pointing to what he called “robust oversight” at the federal level.
A Two-Horse Race Worth Tens of Billions
Polymarket’s rise is happening in lockstep with its biggest rival Kalshi, with the latter closing its own $1 billion Series F round in May, led by Coatue with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, Morgan Stanley and Ark Invest all participating (which valued the company at $22 billion).
Kalshi’s institutional trading volume has also grown 800% over the six months leading into that raise, with annualized volume hitting $178 billion. In fact, between the two platforms, prediction markets have now attracted roughly $2 billion in fresh capital within a matter of months, at valuations that put both companies within a rounding error of each other.
That kind of capital rarely flows into a sector unless investors expect regulatory clarity to eventually break in their favor, a bet that, so far, both platforms and their highest-profile backers are making loudly and publicly. Interesting few months ahead for the two prediction giants, to say the least!
