This week: GMonitor founders on winning First Pitch in Lisbon

Also: CRSHMARKET raises $3.5M for a livestream prediction market product, and the $9M in funding spread across eight rounds in September.

Author

Cody Luongo
October 08, 2026

GMonitor's founders on winning First Pitch and killing the industry’ "Frankenstack"

The news: GMonitor, a competitive intelligence platform for iGaming operators, won First Pitch at SBC Summit in Lisbon last week, beating four other finalists for a prize package valued at more than €100,000. CEO Rishin Kesarla and COO Hakon Magnusson pitched together, days after finishing the ninth cohort of the Zero Labs accelerator in Las Vegas. The bootstrapped company has now opened a pre-seed round to take the platform live in every regulated market. First Pitch is co-organized with BettingStartups.

Zoom in: GMonitor automatically collects what every operator in a market is doing across promotions, games, advertising, and social media, then tells a team what's working and what to do about it. "You can kinda cancel your existing stack, Frankenstack as we call it, of generic market intelligence subscriptions that aren't specific for iGaming," Kesarla said on the BettingStartups Podcast. The platform is primarily live in Spain, with coverage in Canada and Greece, and one large Latin American operator called it a "golden weapon" after a first call, according to Magnusson.

Why it matters: Kesarla calls competitive intelligence the wedge product because it works without any client data. The harder sell is the next step: plugging into operators' internal systems so GMonitor can automate workflows and write back to a CRM. "No one wants to give up their internal data, their secret sauce," he said. The plan is to earn that trust with the external product first, with the first full contracts on internal data targeted within a year.

Hear our full podcast with the Gmonitor founders on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

CRSHMARKET raises $3.5M seed to build a livestream prediction market

The news: CRSHMARKET raised a $3.5M seed round to build what co-founder and CEO Evan Rama calls the first livestream prediction market. 6MV led the round, with participation from Reciprocal Ventures, Lattice, and Starting Line. The raise brings the company's total funding to $4.3M.

Zoom in: Five months after launch, CRSHMARKET has passed $10M in trading volume, 42,000 users, and 500,000 trades, Rama said on LinkedIn. "We're building a new way to interact with live content, where anyone can predict what happens next with 60 second settlements," he wrote. The team has grown to eight full-time employees, with 26 people contributing across the company.

Why it matters: Most prediction market contracts settle when a game, an election, or a data release is over. CRSHMARKET is working on a much shorter clock, with markets that open and settle inside a single stream. The early numbers work out to an average trade of about $20, which points to a product built on frequency rather than size. 

September funding: $9M raised across eight rounds

The news: September was busier than it was big, with eight early-stage rounds totaling $8.95M in disclosed funding (three undisclosed) and seven of them in prediction markets. Disclosed dollars barely moved from August's $8.5M, and no disclosed check topped $3M. The month's largest, Oddpool's $3M seed, surfaced alongside the team's exit to Kalshi.

Zoom in: The larger numbers showed up as valuations, not checks. Market maker Raven took a strategic round from Coinbase Ventures and CMCC Global at a $90M pre-money valuation (more than triple the $25M mark on its 2024 seed), while Novig was reported to be raising at up to a $2B valuation, four times its February mark. The one round outside prediction markets was Topdog's $2.5M seed for head-to-head skill games.

Why it matters: The venture money went to the companies sitting between the exchanges and the people trading on them: data, execution, and liquidity. The exchanges, meanwhile, spent September chasing audience—Novig launched its first national brand campaign with Sydney Sweeney, Prospect Markets signed with Crypto.com to launch a sports-native platform in the US, and ProphetX rolled out Parlay Mode. Small checks and big valuations in the same month suggest investors are still pricing this market well ahead of the dollars going in.

  • Stadium Vault is hiring its first Strategy & Ops Lead to work directly with the CEO across finance, inventory, risk, and expansion. Toronto, Canada. (View job)

  • Novig is looking for a Head of Customer Experience to build out a 24/7 support operation and own the AI and automation roadmap for the CFTC-designated sports prediction market. New York (hybrid/remote). (View job)

  • Stadium Live Studios is hiring a Creative Strategist Lead to own the creative production process end-to-end across paid ads and organic social for its Stadium Vault app. Toronto. (View job)

  • 🆕 BettingJobs is partnering with a fast-moving iGaming platform provider to appoint a Scala/Java Developer to design, build, and evolve its data platform product. Valletta, Malta. (View job)

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