This wave of tech IPO mania has everyone eager to "get on board," including Polymarket.

With SpaceX's Nasdaq listing just 23 days away, this could become the most historic IPO in recorded history.

OpenAI's last valuation reached $500B, Anthropic reportedly valued at $400B, and SpaceX at $1.75T. Globally, 1,600 unicorn companies have cumulatively reached a $5T valuation. Historically, returns from this space were accessible only to institutions and accredited investors. Directly buying shares in these firms requires a six-figure minimum investment, a one-year lock-up, accredited investor certification, and established networks—barriers that exclude retail participants.

Moreover, private companies are under no obligation to disclose their valuations. Valuations lag behind fundraising rounds, secondary market pricing is fragmented, and employee stock transaction prices represent highly sensitive internal data. This gap presents the ideal entry point for prediction markets.

On May 19, Polymarket launched exclusive partnerships with Nasdaq ahead of this pivotal moment, introducing a suite of pre-IPO company valuation prediction contracts. Users can now bet on whether OpenAI will exceed $1T by year-end, whether Anthropic will hit $1.1T by December 31, or whether SpaceX will reach $1.5T before June 30. Nasdaq serves as the official data source, responsible for final contract settlement.

Polymarket previously offered markets for OpenAI’s first-day closing market cap; Bloomberg reported cumulative trading volume of $1.6M since September last year. Kalshi features even denser IPO contracts: the probability of Cerebras Systems going public before 2027 has been driven to 95%, Kraken to 83%, Databricks to 70%, Discord to 70%. Contracts for OpenAI and Anthropic are also available.

Both competing platforms are placing significant emphasis on this pre-IPO surge.

Over the past eight months, Polymarket has been surpassed by Kalshi across nearly every measurable metric.

In April, Kalshi’s monthly volume reached $14.8B, up 13% month-over-month. Polymarket’s combined global and U.S. app volume totaled $10.2B, down 8.9% MoM. Active traders dropped from 733K in March to 643K in April—a decline of 12%. In terms of valuation, Kalshi’s latest round was valued at $22B, while Polymarket is reportedly negotiating a $15B valuation.

A Bank of America report in April noted that Kalshi captured approximately 89% of the domestic prediction market share in the U.S.

Kalshi’s trajectory has consistently outpaced Polymarket’s. In 2020, it received the first-ever Designated Contract Market (DCM) license from the CFTC—the only such license issued specifically to an event-based contract platform. This enables Kalshi to accept USD, issue 1099 forms, integrate SDKs with Robinhood, and allow media outlets like CNN and CNBC to reference its probability data. In February 2024, Kalshi was featured on TIME’s TIME100 list of the most influential companies, and its app briefly approached ChatGPT in app store rankings.

Meanwhile, Polymarket exited the U.S. market in 2022 after being fined $1.4M by the CFTC. The CFTC and Department of Justice concluded their renewed investigation into Polymarket in July 2025, following which it acquired compliance trading licenses via the acquisition of QCEX.

However, Polymarket’s current partnership with Nasdaq may signal the beginning of a comeback.

The specific partner is Nasdaq Private Market (NPM), a company incubated by Nasdaq, dedicated exclusively to private companies. Its two core services are:

First, organizing secondary market liquidity programs for employee shares. Companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic have employees holding large volumes of options or restricted stock. With no public listing, they cannot trade on open markets. NPM facilitates tender offers, enabling employees to sell shares to pre-approved external investors. NPM itself disclosed over $80B in such transactions, covering more than 1,000 liquidity programs led by companies, serving over 200,000 employee shareholders.

Second, building a private company valuation database. NPM sees daily transaction prices of employee shares in the secondary market for OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. These datasets were previously sold exclusively to institutional clients at premium annual fees.

The key step in this collaboration is NPM’s decision to grant Polymarket access to these valuation data for the first time.

Rodolfo Sanchez, Vice President of Data at NPM, stated a pivotal sentence in the press release: “The data flows in both directions.” While NPM provides data to Polymarket for contract settlement, Polymarket’s real-time price curves feed back into NPM as actionable “institutional signals.” When institutions purchase NPM data, they receive not just raw figures, but also a real-time probability curve derived from hundreds of thousands of retail participants’ pricing behavior.

This is not Polymarket’s first foray into selling its own data.

In October 2025, ICE announced an investment of up to $2B, with a pre-money valuation of $8B. The focus wasn’t on valuation—it was on terms. ICE secured exclusive global distribution rights to Polymarket’s data. The sales channels of NYSE’s parent company began selling Polymarket’s probability data to institutional clients worldwide.

In January 2026, Dow Jones entered a unique partnership. Polymarket’s predictive data was integrated into publications including Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, and Investor’s Business Daily. The financial media network under News Corp began embedding Polymarket’s probability signals as standard modules akin to the Dow Jones Industrial Average or VIX within editorial layouts.

In February 2026, ICE officially launched the Polymarket Signals and Sentiment product. Thousands of real-time contract quotes from Polymarket were structured into a standardized data stream, distributed via the ICE Consolidated Feed to institutional clients—delivered alongside NYSE stock data, bond prices, and corporate announcements through the same pipeline. ICE CEO Ben Jackson cited this product alongside Reddit and Dow Jones as one of the three pillars of ICE’s alternative data services during the Q1 earnings call.

Now, this new collaboration represents a strategic bid for control over the most sought-after asset in the private market: valuation arbitration authority.

We speculate Kalshi won’t remain idle. Its next move is likely to involve negotiating a similar structure with a private market data provider. However, mainstream players like Forge and PitchBook are smaller in scale and cover fewer companies than NPM. NPM has already been exclusively secured by Polymarket. For Kalshi to enter this arena, the cost will be significantly higher.

Original: BlockBeats