Novig Just Raised $105 Million to Build a Trader-First Sports Prediction Exchange — How It’s Different From DraftKings and Kalshi

On February 18, 2026, a sports betting startup called Novig announced it had raised $75 million in a Series B funding round led by Pantera Capital, with additional participation from Multicoin Capital, Makers Fund, and Edge Equity. Combined with earlier rounds, Novig has now raised more than $105 million in total capital since launching in late 2024. The company simultaneously disclosed that it had applied to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to become a licensed Designated Contract Market, a move that would allow it to operate in all 50 states. The funding story is notable, but the more interesting question for bettors is what Novig actually is and how it differs from the sportsbooks and prediction platforms most people already use.

What Novig Is and How It Works

Novig describes itself as a peer-to-peer sports trading platform built under a sweepstakes framework, though co-founder and CEO Jacob Fortinsky told Sports Business Journal at the time of the Series B announcement that the company plans to phase out that sweepstakes model within six months and transition fully to a CFTC-regulated prediction market. At its core, Novig is not a traditional sportsbook. There is no house. Users trade contracts with one another rather than against an operator, and the platform charges no commission fees to individual bettors. That last point is the central commercial pitch: every traditional sportsbook and most prediction market platforms take a cut of the action, either through the spread between the yes and no prices or through an explicit fee. Novig charges neither.

The company reported a 10x increase in trading volume during 2025, with annualized trading volume exceeding $4 billion at the time of the announcement. Fortinsky has positioned Novig as “purpose-built for sport,” a distinction from general prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket that cover everything from commodity prices to political elections. Novig’s focus is narrower and more specific: it wants to be the platform where sports traders operate, not a general-purpose financial exchange that happens to offer game outcomes alongside Fed rate decisions.

How Prediction Exchanges Differ From Traditional Sportsbooks

A traditional sportsbook like DraftKings sets prices, takes the other side of every bet, and profits from the margin built into the odds. If a game is a true coin flip, a sportsbook might price both sides at -110, keeping roughly 4.5 cents out of every dollar wagered regardless of the outcome. A prediction exchange removes the operator from the equation. Buyers and sellers are matched directly, and prices are set by the market itself rather than by a trading team. This structure typically produces sharper prices and, for skilled bettors, better expected value over time. The tradeoff is liquidity: an exchange only works when there are enough participants on both sides of a given market to generate fair pricing. Thin markets lead to wide bid-ask spreads, which can erode the very advantage the exchange model promises.

Novig’s $75 million Series B is explicitly aimed at solving the liquidity problem. The new capital will be used to onboard institutional liquidity providers, the same category of sophisticated market participant that makes traditional financial exchanges function efficiently. If Novig succeeds in attracting that kind of counterparty depth, it could genuinely deliver on the zero-commission promise at scale. If it cannot, the model works for high-volume traders but falls apart for the casual bettor who cannot find a match on lower-volume games. For a deeper look at how similar exchange-based models work in practice, the Sporttrade review covers another licensed exchange operating in the U.S. market.

The Funding Story and Who Is Behind It

The Series B was led by Pantera Capital, a blockchain-focused investment firm based in California that has historically concentrated its bets on cryptocurrency infrastructure. Multicoin Capital, another crypto-native fund, also participated. The presence of these investors alongside more traditional gaming-sector names like Forerunner and NFX signals something specific about how Novig’s backers see the long-term market: prediction markets are being underwritten, at least in part, by investors who believe the financial infrastructure underlying them has as much value as the consumer product itself. The $500 million post-money valuation the Series B implies is a significant number for a company that has been live for roughly a year and is still operating under a sweepstakes framework pending regulatory approval.

The CFTC Application and What It Means

The application to become a licensed Designated Contract Market is the most consequential regulatory move Novig has made. A DCM license, which Kalshi holds and Robinhood has pursued through its prediction markets product, allows a platform to offer event contracts under federal commodities law rather than under state-by-state sports betting regulations. This is precisely the legal theory that has generated dozens of cease-and-desist orders and ongoing federal court battles in states including Connecticut, New Jersey, Nevada, Maryland, and Massachusetts. The central question courts are wrestling with is whether CFTC registration preempts state gambling laws, and the answer has not been settled definitively. Novig is betting that it will be, and that being an early DCM licensee positions the company ahead of competitors who were slower to seek federal regulatory cover.

What This Means for Bettors

The practical question is whether any of this changes the day-to-day experience for someone who currently bets through a licensed sportsbook. In the near term, probably not. Novig is still building the liquidity depth needed to be a useful tool across all markets, and the CFTC application is pending. But the $105 million raised and the 10x volume growth during 2025 suggest the platform is past the proof-of-concept stage. For sharp bettors who have found the margin embedded in traditional sportsbook pricing to be the main obstacle to long-term profitability, a zero-commission exchange with deep institutional liquidity would be a genuinely different product. For comparison, DraftKings operates on the traditional model where the house margin is built into every price. The emergence of well-funded exchanges does not make sportsbooks obsolete, but it does give skilled bettors an alternative worth tracking as the regulatory picture clarifies over the next 12 to 18 months.