River Markets, an institutional trading platform for prediction markets, has raised $8.5 million in a seed round led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, Qube Research Technologies and angels from Google, Nvidia, Novig, JPMorgan and Citadel. The founders declined to disclose the valuation, and the round closed in July.
River Markets’ product and market connections
River Markets, co-founded by CEO Oscar Levy and CTO Antonin Parrot, targets professional and institutional traders that want a single interface to access and route orders across multiple prediction markets. Launched in May, the platform provides software, market data connectivity and risk tools designed to aggregate liquidity and manage larger orders across venues such as Kalshi and Polymarket.
Levy said existing consumer-facing UIs are not suited for institutional workflows and that River Markets is focused on making prediction markets “accessible and familiar” for large traders. The company says its algorithms are designed to reduce slippage and limit price swings when executing sizeable trades, and that it is on track to reach hundreds of millions of dollars in annualized trading volume by year-end.
Founders’ trading experience and early traction
Levy and Parrot met at UC Berkeley and later worked in quantitative trading roles on Wall Street. Levy was a vice president and quantitative specialist at BlackRock managing multi-billion dollar portfolios. Parrot worked on electronic trading at Morgan Stanley before moving to high-frequency trading firm Valkyrie Trading as a quantitative researcher. Their initial side project building trading tools for Kalshi and Polymarket reportedly generated seven figures in trading profits before being retooled into River Markets’ enterprise offering.
Use of funds and investor view
Haun Ventures investor Mark Beylin said the founders can “speak both to this esoteric market language” and apply experience from traditional trading tech to prediction markets. River Markets plans to use the seed capital to hire engineers, improve trading speed and security, and expand sales and operations as it onboards more institutional clients. The startup also intends to build additional tools for larger-scale capital deployment and risk management across prediction markets as institutional activity on platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket increases.
