CNN teams up with prediction market giant Kalshi: The "Future News" experiment behind a $10 billion valuation

Global news giant CNN has entered into a groundbreaking exclusive partnership agreement with prediction market platform Kalshi, fully integrating Kalshi’s real-time event probability data into its television, digital, and streaming content. This move aims to reshape news narratives—shifting the focus from reporting “what has happened” to helping the public interpret “what might happen in the future.” The partnership comes as Kalshi completes a $1 billion funding round at an $11 billion valuation, making its 29-year-old co-founder Luana Lopes Lara the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. This marks the entry of prediction markets—products rooted in crypto and betting concepts—into the mainstream core of information distribution.

Reshaping News Narratives: Why is CNN Embracing Prediction Markets?

Traditional journalism is founded on recording, verifying, and interpreting the past and present. CNN’s collaboration with Kalshi aims to add a “data lens” focused on the future to its newsroom. Under the agreement, CNN will access Kalshi’s real-time data through an automatically updating API and display it as a rolling ticker on TV screens. Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten and other reporters will cite these market-derived probability figures when analyzing politics, culture, news, and even weather forecasts.

Sam Felix, CNN’s SVP of Strategic Partnerships, stated that the move aims to provide journalists with “an entirely new, data-driven perspective” to explore and understand the world. Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour pointed out that traditional journalism focuses on explaining what has already happened, but now, with prediction market data, reporters can help audiences interpret what is likely to happen next with greater accuracy. The core logic behind this shift is that prediction markets aggregate the collective wisdom of countless participants betting real money, producing probabilities that can filter out noise and reflect the true expectations of the crowd, rather than individual wishes.

This is an exclusive, non-monetary agreement—CNN does not pay for data licensing, but also cannot integrate data from other prediction market platforms (like Polymarket). This deep integration highlights CNN’s recognition of Kalshi’s data authority and model, and reflects Kalshi’s ambition to position itself as “the world’s most authoritative source for future event probabilities” through top-tier media partnerships.

Kalshi’s Ascent: From Regulatory Struggles to $11 Billion Unicorn

CNN’s endorsement did not come out of nowhere—it is a high point in Kalshi’s explosive growth and arduous compliance journey in recent years. Founded by two 29-year-old MIT graduates, the company’s latest valuation has soared to $11 billion, growing fivefold in less than six months. Behind this remarkable trajectory is a startup epic of regulatory battles that it ultimately won.

Kalshi’s core challenge lay in the legality of its business. Prediction markets allow users to bet on future outcomes, existing in a gray area between financial derivatives regulation and gambling law in the US. To build a “global financial exchange the right way,” co-founders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour chose the hardest path: seeking federal regulation. They contacted over 40 law firms, were repeatedly rejected, and finally, with the help of a former CFTC official, secured CFTC approval in November 2020, becoming a regulated designated contract market.

The true milestone, however, came in 2024. When the CFTC rejected Kalshi’s presidential election contracts on “gambling-like” grounds, Lopes Lara decided to sue the regulator against all odds. In September 2024, the court ruled in favor of Kalshi, allowing it to legally launch the first election contracts in the US in over a century. During the 2024 election, Kalshi users wagered over $500 million and successfully predicted Trump’s victory. This crucial compliance victory not only cleared the biggest barrier to its business but also greatly enhanced its credibility as a reliable information source—laying the foundation for the partnership with CNN.

Key Kalshi Growth Data and Milestones

Latest Valuation: $11 billion (5x growth in six months)

Latest Funding: $1 billion, led by Paradigm with participation from Sequoia Capital, a16z, and others.

Trading Volume: Notional trading volume up 8x since July, reaching $5.8 billion in November; current weekly volume exceeds $1 billion.

Core Compliance Victory: Won lawsuit against the CFTC in September 2024, approved to launch legal election prediction contracts.

Founder Achievements: Co-founders Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour (both 29) became billionaires; Lopes Lara is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

Key Partnerships: In addition to CNN, partnerships include Robinhood, Webull, NHL, StockX, Google Finance, and others.

From Ballet Dancer to Billionaire: The Founders’ Extraordinary Journey

Kalshi’s story is made even more legendary by its founders. Luana Lopes Lara, now the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, has lived a life as meticulously choreographed and filled with extreme challenges as a dance. Born in Brazil, she attended the rigorous Bolshoi Ballet School there, enduring brutal training such as teachers testing dancers’ endurance with lit cigarettes. This experience forged her extraordinary perseverance and resilience; as a16z partner Alex Immerman put it, “Nothing trains you to persist after rejection quite like trying to be a professional ballet dancer.”

But Lopes Lara’s ambitions went far beyond the stage. Influenced by her engineer parents, she excelled in math and science from a young age and won awards in astronomy and math olympiads. After nine months as a professional dancer in Austria, she decisively entered MIT to study computer science, aspiring to be “the next Steve Jobs.” At MIT, she met Tarek Mansour, another international student who had lived through the conflict in Lebanon. The two connected while interning at the same New York hedge fund, and during late-night walks in the financial district, conceived the idea of a marketplace for directly trading event probabilities.

Their entrepreneurial journey began in 2019 with Y Combinator, followed by a two-year regulatory battle with no product output. Lopes Lara worked remotely from London during the pandemic, while Mansour participated in community rescue efforts during the Beirut explosion by day and continued to build Kalshi by night. This “graceful perseverance” under extreme pressure is seen by investors as the key personality trait that allowed them to break through seemingly impossible regulatory barriers.

Prediction Markets Heat Up: The Fusion of Information, Finance, and Betting

The CNN–Kalshi partnership is not an isolated case, but part of a broader industry trend. Recently, Yahoo Finance integrated Polymarket’s data, and Sports Illustrated and TIME magazine have partnered with prediction market platform Galactic. Media companies are seeking to use these novel data collaborations to attract audiences and explore new revenue streams.

Behind this trend is the prediction market sector’s own white-hot competition. Kalshi’s main competitor, blockchain-based Polymarket, has also reached a $9 billion valuation and received approval to operate in the US in September 2024. The two platforms recorded $5 billion and $3.6 billion in election wagers, respectively, during the presidential race—competition is fierce. To respond, Kalshi even expanded its markets to the Solana blockchain in December 2024, directly entering the crypto-native space.

At their core, prediction markets are financial tools for information aggregation and price discovery. They turn individuals’ dispersed judgments about the future into continuously updated market prices (probabilities) via trading mechanisms. In theory, this makes them less susceptible to manipulation and more responsive than traditional polling. For the crypto industry, the rise of prediction markets has deeper significance: it validates the value of decentralized, global, incentive-based information processing—a core blockchain principle. Although over 90% of Kalshi’s current trading volume comes from sports and it faces state-level legal challenges categorizing it as gambling, its breakthroughs in politics and social events have already opened the door to “future information trading.”

How Prediction Markets Work and Their Connection to Crypto

Basic Operating Principle of Prediction Markets

A prediction market is a trading platform where users can buy and sell “contracts” tied to the outcomes of future events. For example, a contract on “whether a candidate will win an election” trades between $0 and $1, with the price interpreted as the probability of the event (e.g., $0.65 means a 65% chance of winning). If you believe the probability is higher than the current price, you buy; if not, you sell or short. After the event, the correct contract settles at $1, the incorrect at $0. Collective trading continuously generates and refines this “wisdom of the crowd” probability. Kalshi defines its products as CFTC-regulated “event contracts” derivatives, distinguishing them from gambling.

Prediction Market Main Player Comparison (Kalshi vs. Polymarket)

The Kalshi ticker flashing across CNN screens is more than just a new data stream—it’s a symbol at the crossroads of an era: on one side stands the traditional news fortress defending objective facts, on the other, the radical market experiment that believes “collective predictions with money on the line are closer to the truth.” As mainstream media begins to use prediction market probabilities as an authoritative lens for interpreting the world, we witness not just an industry merger but a potential shift in cognitive paradigms. For the crypto world, this story is particularly thought-provoking—a startup once on the brink of extinction due to regulatory battles ultimately achieved a billion-dollar valuation by conquering the most mainstream rule-makers (the courts) and information distributors (the media). This may suggest that the next globally impactful crypto-native application’s path to success may not lie in completely overthrowing the old system, but in finding a subtle “interface” that translates decentralized insights into a “new language” the old world can understand and rely on. Kalshi’s story is still being written.