Valence Unifies Prediction Markets Trading Across Kalshi, Polymarket, and Beyond

The Macro: Prediction Markets Went Mainstream and the Infrastructure Did Not Keep Up

Prediction markets had their breakout moment during the 2024 US presidential election. Polymarket became a household name. Kalshi got regulatory approval and started listing events that people actually cared about. The combined volume across prediction market platforms has exploded, and the growth shows no signs of slowing.

But the infrastructure for trading prediction markets is fragmented. Kalshi is its own platform with its own interface. Polymarket runs on crypto rails with a completely different system. Metaculus, PredictIt, and other platforms each have their own APIs, their own order books, and their own liquidity pools. If you want to trade across all of them, you need multiple accounts, multiple interfaces, and manual effort to compare prices.

For casual bettors, this fragmentation is annoying but manageable. For serious traders, it is a real problem. Arbitrage opportunities exist constantly between platforms. The same contract priced at 63 cents on Kalshi might be at 58 cents on Polymarket. But capturing that spread requires monitoring multiple platforms simultaneously and executing trades fast enough before the prices converge.

Traditional financial markets solved this problem decades ago. Bloomberg terminals aggregate data across exchanges. Smart order routing executes across venues. Backtesting tools let traders validate strategies against historical data. Prediction markets have none of this infrastructure yet.

The Micro: Three Quant Interns Who Built Their Own Trading Desk

Neo Wang, Daniel Kasabov-Nouvion, and Arthur Zhou founded Valence. The backgrounds are almost comically well-suited. Neo interned at Citadel Securities as a quantitative developer and at DRW and Cubist Systematic Strategies. Daniel interned at IMC Trading and Citadel. Arthur did two internships at Jane Street and is a USAMO qualifier. These are people who understand trading infrastructure at a deep level.

Valence provides infrastructure to aggregate and execute contracts across Kalshi, Polymarket, and other platforms. It surfaces arbitrage and mispricing opportunities in real time. And it gives systematic traders the API and backtesting tools they need to build and execute data-driven strategies.

The traction is striking. They have facilitated over 1 billion contracts in trading volume, growing from 7 million to 250 million contracts between September and December 2025. That is explosive growth. The platform clearly has product-market fit with active traders.

They are a three-person team from San Francisco, part of YC Winter 2026 working with Diana Hu.

The Verdict

Valence is building the Bloomberg terminal for prediction markets. The founding team has exactly the right background. The traction proves the demand. And the market is growing fast as prediction markets become more mainstream and more liquid.

The risk is regulatory. Prediction markets operate in a complex regulatory environment. Kalshi is CFTC-regulated. Polymarket runs offshore. New regulations could reshape the market structure overnight. Valence needs to be adaptable enough to handle regulatory changes without losing functionality.

The competitive risk comes from the platforms themselves. Kalshi could build cross-platform aggregation. Polymarket could add professional trading tools. But building a neutral aggregation layer is different from building a trading venue, and Valence benefits from being platform-agnostic.

In 30 days, I want to see the arbitrage capture rate. How many identified opportunities actually get executed? In 60 days, the question is systematic strategy performance. Are traders using Valence’s tools actually making money? In 90 days, I want to know about new platform integrations. The more venues Valence covers, the more valuable the aggregation becomes.