Yesterday was a game-changing milestone for Kalshi and an appropriate opportunity to recognize some of the wonderful individuals who made our journey possible.
As Bloomberg reported, Susquehanna International Group (SIG) just announced a dedicated trading desk to invest in Kalshi event contracts. This is a pivotal moment for Kalshi and for prediction markets as a concept.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of this news. SIG, one of the world’s largest market-makers with ~$2 Trillion in annual volume, will bring to Kalshi exactly what’s been missing to fulfill our vision of becoming a major Wall St financial exchange: volume and liquidity.
This is the culmination of years of obsession and iteration by a team that has poured their hearts into Kalshi’s mission. As we reflect on the people behind this work, all roads lead to Neo. Neo has been not just an early investor, but also a partner in building our company. More than half our entire team in the early years came from Neo! Shout out to:
Rainer Sainvil for building and iterating on products at lightspeed. He’s one of the fastest in the game.
Lior Hirschfeld for jumping on any fire. I literally mean any, and trust me we’ve had a lot of those at Kalshi.
Sumer Sao for building the early versions of our payment systems.
Lucie le Blanc for building V1 that is currently used by SIG for market making.
Dhruvik Parikh employee #1 - forever dear to our hearts.
Yash Ramchandani for a swift but impactful internship.
Zac Schulwolf for building v1 of our market operations that run our market listing process (gnarly system with gnarly reqs).
Daniel Chiu for early Kalshi product strategy and website.
Justin W. Lin for early Kalshi infra, when we had no infra.
Phil Bogle for orchestrating Kalshi's launch as a regulated exchange. We wouldn't be here without Phil – he literally shepherded the launch of the exchange.
Last of all, we’d like to thank Neo CEO Ali Partovi, who believed in us from the start and remains our first call when we need help. Ali doubled down on Kalshi after other VCs said it was too risky to invest; he introduced us to almost all our subsequent investors including Sequoia, Henry Kravis, and Chuck Schwab; and his unwavering conviction persuaded incredible engineers to join us when all we had was a vision. ❤️