Polymarket has launched a new category of prediction markets focused on private companies, allowing users to trade on questions tied to pre-IPO startups, in a move that could open up price discovery in one of the least transparent corners of global finance.
The new markets, announced Tuesday, were built in partnership with Nasdaq Private Market, a platform that facilitates secondary trading in shares of privately held companies. Nasdaq Private Market will supply the underlying data and infrastructure powering the contracts.
What users can trade on
The new contracts are designed around key milestones in the private company lifecycle, including fundraising rounds, valuation changes, and other significant corporate events involving late-stage startups. The launch marks a meaningful expansion of Polymarket’s product range beyond its established focus on politics, macroeconomic events, and public markets.
Polymarket pointed to the explosive growth of the unicorn ecosystem as a key driver behind the move. There are now nearly 1,600 privately held companies valued at $1 billion or more worldwide, with a combined valuation exceeding $5 trillion, yet meaningful pricing data on these companies remains largely inaccessible to the average investor. Prediction markets, the company argues, can fill that gap.
Institutional interest in prediction markets is rising
The Nasdaq partnership reflects a broader shift in how traditional finance is beginning to engage with prediction markets, an asset class that has historically sat at the fringes of mainstream investing.
Retail traders still dominate activity on these platforms, accounting for around 80% of prediction market volume according to a recent report by Bitget Wallet and Polymarket. But Wall Street’s interest is clearly growing, driven by an improving US regulatory environment and increasingly robust market infrastructure.
The milestone of the first institutional block trade on rival platform Kalshi, a privately negotiated, large-scale transaction of the kind typically reserved for major institutional investors, was recently flagged by Bernstein analysts as a significant turning point for the sector.
For Polymarket, the Nasdaq tie-up is a calculated step toward capturing a share of that institutional attention while simultaneously offering retail users access to a market they currently have almost no data-driven way to participate in.
A market with few alternatives
Private company valuation data is notoriously difficult to access. Unlike public equities, where prices are updated in real time and financials are publicly disclosed, private companies operate with very limited reporting obligations. Secondary markets exist, Nasdaq Private Market being one of the most prominent, but they are illiquid and largely restricted to accredited investors.
By layering prediction markets on top of Nasdaq Private Market’s data, Polymarket is attempting to create a more democratised, real-time signal for what the market thinks is going to happen at some of the world’s most closely watched private companies, before they ever go public.
