Trump Jr.’s fund puts $300M into Polymarket at $21B valuation

The Wall Street Journal reported the figure, citing a fund representative: 1789 Capital plans to put roughly $300 million into Polymarket’s newest funding round. The firm already holds around $200 million in the company from an earlier stake, so this new check pushes it into the ranks of Polymarket’s largest backers. Once the round closes, Polymarket’s valuation lands near $21 billion, about 40% above the roughly $15 billion mark it was sitting at before.

Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789 Capital, which puts him on both sides of Polymarket’s business at once. He joined the company’s advisory board last year, called it the largest prediction market in the world at the time, and has more recently told Republican state attorneys general that prediction markets should stay out of state regulators’ hands entirely. Now his own fund is writing one of the biggest checks in its latest raise. None of that is illegal or even unusual in venture circles, but it does mean the person publicly cheerleading for Polymarket’s growth has a direct financial stake in that growth actually happening.

Polymarket isn’t raising money in a vacuum either. Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, put in an extra $600 million back in March, bringing total outside investment in Polymarket to $1.6 billion. That’s serious institutional money treating a prediction market the way it would treat any other financial exchange worth building a position in early.

Kalshi is running the same playbook on a similar timeline. It raised $1 billion in April at a $22 billion valuation, already ahead of where Polymarket sits even after this new round, and its actual trading volume has pulled even further ahead of Polymarket’s this year, and The Information reports the company is now lining up another raise that could push its valuation toward $40 billion. Two competitors, both racing to lock in bigger numbers before the market for these companies cools off, and both apparently convinced investors that the bet is worth taking at prices nobody would have guessed a year ago. Trump Jr.’s dual role adds a wrinkle neither company had to deal with before he showed up on both an advisory board and a cap table at once — advocacy and ownership sitting in the same set of hands tends to draw more scrutiny than either one would on its own.