River Markets announced on Tuesday that it completed an $8.5 million seed round of financing in July, led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures, along with other investors including Qube Research Technologies and angel investors from Google, Nvidia, Novig, JPMorgan, and Citadel. The founders declined to disclose the valuation for this round.

The company's founders stated that to meet the institutional demand for predictive markets on a large scale, technology is needed that allows institutions to trade across platforms and handle larger orders. Since its launch in May, River Markets has been providing institutions with relevant software, data connections, and risk management tools, with algorithms designed to reduce the volatility caused by large trades on market prices.

The company expects its platform's annualized trading volume to exceed hundreds of millions of dollars by the end of this year.

River Markets was co-founded by CEO Oscar Levy and CTO Antonin Parrot, providing professional traders with a unified interface to access and route orders across multiple predictive markets (such as Kalshi and Polymarket).

The funds will primarily be used for hiring engineers, enhancing the speed and security of the trading system, expanding the sales and operations team, and developing tools to support large-scale capital deployment and cross-platform risk management.

Market mechanisms indicate that institutional funds are accelerating into predictive markets, driving up the demand for dedicated trading infrastructure, with funds flowing towards providers of tools that can address cross-platform liquidity and large order impact, putting pressure on platforms dominated by retail interfaces.

The founding team previously generated seven-figure trading profits by building trading tools for Kalshi and Polymarket.

Source: Public Information