Novig’s valuation quadruples to $2 billion, but five state lawsuits are still open

Novig’s valuation has quadrupled to $2 billion in a new funding round, according to The Information, which cited reporting first surfaced by The Wall Street Journal. That’s up from the $500 million valuation set in February, when the sports prediction platform closed a $75 million Series B led by Pantera Capital. Most of the new money reportedly came from existing backers rather than new names, meaning the people repricing Novig this high are largely the same investors who already owned a piece of it at a quarter of the price.

The jump traces back to a single ad. Sydney Sweeney, who holds an equity stake in the company, fronted Novig’s first national campaign, “Just Sports,” and the numbers moved fast once it launched: trading volume climbed nearly 94% and first-time depositors jumped more than 218% in the weeks around the spot, with search interest in the platform hitting its highest point on Google Trends that same month. Regulatory timing mattered too. The CFTC designated Novig a registered contract market in June, which let the platform launch federally regulated sports event contracts nationwide in early August rather than fighting state by state for licenses the way a traditional sportsbook has to.

That federal registration cuts both ways, though. Novig went on the offensive almost immediately after launch, suing New York, Massachusetts, Washington, New Mexico, and Wisconsin in federal court, arguing its CFTC status preempts state gambling law entirely. Wisconsin wasn’t a random pick, the state had already gone after other prediction market operators before Novig filed, so the lawsuit reads as pre-empting a fight the company expected anyway. None of the five cases are resolved. A $2 billion price tag built on a federal registration that five states are actively contesting in court is a bet that the legal argument holds, not a settled fact, and the ad that made Novig a household name doesn’t touch that question either way.

The valuation also has to be read against the size of the market Novig is chasing. Founders Jacob Fortinsky and Kelechi Ukah built the platform as a commission-free, peer-to-peer exchange, where traders bet against each other directly instead of against a house, with no vig taken out of winnings and no punitive limits placed on players who win consistently. That pitch is aimed squarely at the roughly $2 trillion global sports betting market, but Novig is still a distant third by valuation: Kalshi sits at roughly $40 billion and Polymarket at around $21 billion, both built around broader prediction markets rather than sports specifically. At $2 billion, Novig is worth a twentieth of Kalshi, which makes this round a bet on catching up rather than a claim to have arrived.

The ad itself split opinion well outside the investor conversation. Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus called the campaign “an absolute joke,” while sprinter Amy Hunt pushed back with “this is what women in sport look like,” and at least one communications academic described the whole approach as “almost like an instigating troll sort of thing” designed to provoke exactly this kind of split reaction. Fortinsky has leaned into the growth numbers rather than litigating the criticism, telling CNBC the campaign gave Novig a “significant second-mover advantage” against Kalshi and Polymarket, and responding to the backlash directly: “we have nothing to apologize for.”