Posted on: September 25, 2025, 12:41h.
Last updated on: September 25, 2025, 12:41h.
- Startup prediction markets firm raised $3.5 million from multiple investors
- Company wants to roll out “viral” prediction markets
Melee, an upstart prediction markets firm, raised $3.5 million from several investors — financing that could support the company’s efforts to refresh the event contracts proposition.
Various angel investors as well as DBA and Variant participated in the funding round, which was classified as a pre-seed raise. Melee’s goal is to take prediction markets beyond the centralized nature of behemoths like Kalshi and Polymarket, empowering users to create their own markets. Typically, the event contracts offered by the largest exchanges in the space are set by the operators, not users.
Melee is a permissionless prediction platform built to scale like the Internet,” according to a recent X post by the company. “Anyone can make a market about anything (fact or opinion).”
The company is positioning itself as the “next evolution of prediction markets”, tapping into the creator-driven, limitless potential of the internet. Melee calls it “viral markets.”
Melee Confirms Investor Appetite for Prediction Markets
Currently, Melee is in waitlist mode as highlighted on its website, but the youthful event contracts firm is the latest to prove an important: investors are enthusiastic about prediction markets and they’re willing to allocate capital to that effect.
Capital raises this year by giants Kalshi and Polymarket have reached into nine figures, pushing valuations on those companies to an estimated $5 billion and $9 billion, respectively. Not even nine months into the year, prediction markets have raised a total of $216 million, more than doubling the 2024 tally.
One of the primary reasons professional investors are rushing to back yes/no exchanges is the industry’s ties to cryptocurency. Melee checks that box because it runs on the Solana blockchain. DBA, one of the participants in Melee’s pre-seed capital raise, is New York-based crypto investment firm.
Power to the People
There are examples of viral internet phenomena reaching into traditional prediction markets, but that’s not the typical operating methodology for those companies. Rather, operators like Kalshi and Polymarket lean heavily into contracts tethered to economic data, financial assets, politics, and sports.
Melee is looking to shake things up by empowering creators. The company promises creators will have access to a durable revenue model free of reputational risk. Said another way, Melee creators will be incentivized to positively engage with traders and if the former are effective in that pursuit, they’ll generate revenue.
“Combining this creator incentivization structure with viral price mechanics unlocks real time viral markets. Much like the phenomenon of meme tokens, creators will naturally compete to make markets about cultural events as they happen, leading to better and more creative markets at scale,” according to an X post by the company.
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