Sequoia nearly passed on Kalshi
Hi, and welcome to a new edition of The Daily Dealflow — the 5-minute briefing that gives you clear context on capital flows and market-moving trends across the Americas, from Silicon Valley to Buenos Aires. Let's dive in.
🏆 Deal of the Day
Kalshi raised $1B in a Series G at a $40B post-money valuation, up from $22B in May. Wellington Management and Sequoia Capital co-led, with Baillie Gifford, Stripes, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Layer Global, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Sequoia Global Equities, CapitalG, Hudson River Trading and Balyasny Asset Management also in.
Why This?: The federally regulated prediction market exchange founded by MIT classmates Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara says it will use the money to grow globally, with a focus on Latin America and Europe, so a $40B exchange built on betting is now heading south.
Positive Context:
- Kalshi reports annualized trading volume above $1T, more than 30M accounts created and over 75% of prediction market trading volume. Non-sports annualized revenue is above $1B, and crypto contracts alone run at $140B in annualized volume – Kalshi.
- Annualized revenue was reportedly "well over $4B" in August, per The Information, so the valuation sits at roughly 10x run-rate revenue. Bloomberg reported the round may be the last before an IPO as early as 2027 .
Yes, but:
- Sports event contracts account for roughly 87% of Kalshi's trading volume, according to Ticker-Tracker.com, and the company faces mounting legal challenges to them – CDC Gaming Reports.
- Utah sued Kalshi in October over alleged illegal gambling, and Arizona has filed criminal charges against it.
Zoom in: Sequoia, a co-lead of this round, almost walked away from Kalshi at the start because of a miscommunication, and partner Alfred Lin confirmed it.
Market context: Prediction markets have become a speculation machine. Pew Research found combined Kalshi and Polymarket volume rose from about $26B in May to $53B in July, with sports about 79% of July volume, and sports volume in Q1 was roughly on par with the $40B Americans wagered at legal sportsbooks. The World Cup pushed sports trading above $58B on Kalshi alone in June and July – Pew Research Center. Regulators are catching up: the CFTC has proposed rules limiting prediction market sports contracts, and Kalshi lost a bid to stop New York from regulating prediction markets. Kalshi's valuation has gone from $2B in June 2025 to $40B, roughly twenty times in about 16 months.
💰 Venture Capital
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Traversal (US) – $120M, Series B, AI agents for site reliability engineering that analyze logs, metrics and code to find the cause of outages, co-led by Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures and Khosla Ventures at a $1B valuation, with Sequoia Capital, Battery Ventures and Amex Ventures also in. CEO Anish Agarwal founded it with Raj Agrawal, Raaz Dwivedi and Ahmed Lone, and customers include Nubank, Harvey, DigitalOcean, PepsiCo and American Express. Agarwal describes a bank outage that needed a "war room" of thousands of engineers, and says Traversal found a similar problem months later in five minutes – The Next Web.
Pulpos (Mexico) – undisclosed, acquired by Mexican fintech unicorn Clip, cloud-based business management software for sales, inventory, e-invoicing, finances and online stores, plus AI agents that work through WhatsApp. Founded in 2023, Pulpos raised $9M in total: a $4M seed backed by Andreessen Horowitz, H20 Capital Innovation, Latitud and Newtopia, and a $5M round led by Dalus Capital in April 2026. Three years from founding to an exit is quick, even by startup standards – LatamList.
Trajectory (US) – $45M, Series A, a platform that automates fine-tuning so AI models keep learning from human feedback, led by Sequoia with Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures, at a $300M valuation. Stanford classmates Ronak Malde, Michael Elabd and Arjun Karanam founded it about a year ago with 18 employees, and customers already include Harvey, Rogo, Decagon, Mercor and Nvidia. Malde compares today's models to a smart PhD student who keeps starting a new job – TechCrunch.
Tutor Intelligence (US) – $75M, Series B, robot foundation models and internet-connected warehouse and factory robots called "Sonny" and "Cassie," led by Andreessen Horowitz with Union Square Ventures and Neo participating. Josh Gruenstein and Alon Kosowsky-Sachs founded it, and customers pay by the hour or per pick with no upfront purchase. Remote operators called "tutors" help the robots, and each finished task becomes training data. The company expects more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027 – Robotics 24/7.
🏛️ Private Equity
Rune Technologies (US) – Reported $375M acquisition by Salesforce, adding military logistics AI built by Anduril alumni David Tuttle and Peter Goldsborough. Backed by a16z and Point72 Ventures, Rune works even offline; the price approaches triple its last valuation – The Investor Society.
Televisa and Fintech Holdings (Mexico) – $2B, acquisition of AT&T México, with the fund and the media group buying the carrier. AT&T says it wants to concentrate its capital in the U.S., and Televisa would add about 24.7M mobile subscribers, which would let it sell phone, pay TV, broadband and landline bundles against América Móvil. El Financiero says closing is expected in the first quarter of 2027, pending regulatory approvals – El Financiero.
Perion Network (Israel/US-listed) – $420M, acquisition, with India's Affle 3i buying the Tel Aviv-based ad tech company, listed on Nasdaq and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, for $11.70 per share in cash through its Israeli subsidiary. Affle aims to take its cost-per-converted-user model into developed markets, and Perion brings a strong North American footprint – The Daily Buyout.
Marathon Petroleum refineries (US) – $4.2B plus inventory, acquisition, with Icahn-controlled CVR Energy buying the St. Paul Park, Minnesota (105,000 b/d) and Mandan, North Dakota (72,000 b/d) refineries and a marketing business. Marathon gets $3.45B and its midstream arm MPLX gets $750M. The purchase lifts CVR's crude throughput from about 207,000 b/d to about 384,000 b/d, with about $70M a year in expected synergies, and closing is expected by year-end. CVR proposed a $750M stock offering and its shares fell about 13.5% – Oil & Gas Journal, Bloomberg.
📈 Public & Capital Markets
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) – earnings report, consumer hardware and services. Record September-quarter revenue of $114.5B, up 12%, with a 47.9% gross margin. The holiday-quarter margin forecast disappointed and the shares fell 1.88%, roughly $93B in market value – StockTitan.
Palantir (Nasdaq: PLTR) – Q3 earnings, data analytics and AI software. Palantir beat third-quarter expectations and raised full-year guidance, yet the stock fell as new contract bookings slowed sharply and investors fretted over valuation – TheStreet.
Fiserv (Nasdaq: FISV) – earnings report, payments and financial technology. It raised its cost-savings target and announced share buybacks, and the shares rose about 13.6%. On the other side, Gartner fell about 14% and Dynatrace about 11% – StockTitan.
Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) – equity and debt offering, enterprise software and cloud. A stock sale priced at $116 per share, alongside $10B in bonds, to fund AI infrastructure – StockTitan.
📅 ICYMI
A Chinese Startup is selling a $1K AI laser that tracks mosquitoes and burns off their wings. Buyers must pass a 15-question safety test and register a fingerprint, and the company already has 5K prepaid orders.
A company called Everbloom developed Renoa, a cheaper, easier-to-wash cashmere alternative made from waste proteins and feather lint. It is the first new fiber to win FTC approval in 25 years, with products expected next year.
The race for computing power is so heated that SK Hynix, the globe’s second-largest supplier of DRAM memory cells, says it’s “effectively sold out” through 2029.
See you tomorrow,
Katherine Castelán & Jose Kont
The humans behind The Investor Society