This week: XO Market raises $6M to build the “YouTube of prediction markets”

BettingJobs is the leading international recruitment provider to the iGaming sector, connecting top talent with innovative companies worldwide.

XO Market raises $6M to build the “YouTube of prediction markets”

The news: XO Market closed a $6 million seed round led by 20VC, Picus Capital, and Coinbase Ventures to build what it's calling the "YouTube of prediction markets," or in simple terms, a platform where users create and run their own markets rather than trading on a curated list set by the platform. Since its mainnet beta launched in mid-November, XO has generated more than $150M in trading volume, attracted over 30,000 users, and has more than 600 active user-created markets.

Zoom in: The upstart is positioning itself as an alternative to the current incumbent market leaders. "Today's major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket act more like Netflix," co-founder Ali Habbabeh told CoinDesk. "They decide what markets exist. We've flipped that model entirely. On XO, users create the markets themselves." Coming next is XO Vaults, a product that lets users pool capital to provide liquidity across markets (targeting annual yields of 8–10%), which is set to take aim at the professional market-making firms that currently dominate that layer.

Why it matters: Competing user-generated platforms like Nine Lives and Warm Protocol have struggled to convert the concept into meaningful liquidity, so XO's real test is whether or not the model can scale without fragmenting into a graveyard of illiquid markets. If XO can solve the liquidity problem through vaults and community incentives, the user-generated model could carve out a meaningful niche—especially for niche events that curated platforms might ignore.

Elastics closes $2M for prediction market-focused AI agents

The news: Warsaw-based Elastics has closed a $2M oversubscribed pre-seed round led by French VC Frst to build AI agents for prediction markets. The platform, which is currently in private beta, lets traders automate research, signal generation, and execution through plain-language instructions.

Zoom in: Co-founder Szymon Pawica, a former Goldman Sachs employee, says AI has reached a point where it can bring the competitive advantage at hedge funds to everyday people and traders. "The quant edge at hedge funds comes down to people and infrastructure. We think AI can now replicate most of that and make it available to anyone." Notable angels include ElevenLabs founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski and a16z's Bartek Pucek.

Why it matters: Kalshi is valued at $22B, Polymarket is processing over $20B in monthly volume, and total prediction market trading passed $50bn in 2025, and now retail traders are just starting to get access to more advanced tooling. Elastics is building on that gap now, with longer-term ambitions to extend the same AI-driven infrastructure into financial markets beyond prediction markets altogether.

Sponsored content

BettingStartups has teamed up with SBC Summit Americas to host the conference’s Startup Zone. The section will feature dedicated space on the show floor for startups, early-stage companies, and founders alike, with prime real estate to connect with the 10,000 delegates headed to the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale from June 9–11.

BettingStartups is offering an exclusive 80% discount on Startup Zone booths, and less than a handful remain. Click here to register your interest and secure one of the last remaining spots.

Hydrastack is building the fastest way to bring land-based casino games online

The news: Hydrastack, a Chicago-based startup, is building a platform that converts existing class III land-based slot games into online-ready versions at a fraction of the time and cost. The upstart compresses the timeline into six to eight weeks—compared to the six to eight months and roughly $500,000 per title required through the current process. The company uses fine-tuned AI models to ingest a game's existing codebase and handle the conversion automatically, without requiring developers to change how they build.

Zoom in: CEO David Dimas, a former WMS Gaming product manager, frames the problem as an industry-wide failure of imagination: "Manufacturers are treating this as a re-authoring exercise," he said on The BettingStartups Podcast. The platform's AI models are open-source forks kept siloed per manufacturer, so conversion data from one studio doesn't cross-contaminate another's—a concern that has come up across hundreds of customer discovery calls, Dimas said.

Why it matters: The land-to-online bottleneck isn't just a cost problem, but also a content velocity problem. Players cycle through available titles in three to four weeks, and operators can't restock fast enough. If Hydrastack's pilot with one of the “Big Three” manufacturers holds up, it could meaningfully compress the content pipeline for the whole industry, with a reverse-conversion path (online to land-based) already on the 2027 roadmap.

Listen to the full podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

News, money, and alpha 🗞️

• ALT Sports Data partnered with Caesars Entertainment to power a new Formula 1 betting product.

• FantasySpin has merged with FastDraft to create the “ultimate fantasy sports platform.”

• Odditt launched a B2B platform that turns odds feeds into contextualized parlays and betting content for operators to embed directly into their products.

• Verse Gaming co-founder Daniel Zimmerman has revealed a new role as co-founder and Chief Intelligence Officer at Betting Intelligence.

• Defy The Odds is hosting an “Ask Me Anything” session with industry investor Benjie Cherniak on May 13. RSVP here.

Great gigs 💼

Big opportunities with awesome growth-stage companies, brought to you by BettingJobs.

• Alt Sports Data is hiring a Vice President of Finance to build and lead the company’s financial engine from its Toronto office. (View job)

• Winible is on the lookout for a Head of Payments & Risk to own payments infrastructure, fraud management, and platform integrity at a sports betting creator economy company. Remote. (View job)

• ProphetX is seeking a Mobile QA Engineer to own iOS and Android quality remotely across the sports prediction market platform. (View job)

From the studio 🎙️

Catch up on the latest episodes of The BettingStartups Podcast.

• Building the "aspirin" for casino game distribution headaches

• Digitizing the Super Bowl squares concept w/ Nathan & Brett from Grid Gorilla

• Transforming traditional raffles into a B2B retention tool

You’ve made it to the end of the newsletter—seems like you should probably subscribe if you haven’t already.

Are you a startup in real-money gaming looking to announce a new product launch, partnership, or funding round? Get it on our radar! Email: [email protected]