5c(c) Capital: New VC Fund Backed by Polymarket and Kalshi CEOs Bets on Prediction-Market Ecosystem
A new venture capital firm dedicated to prediction markets is launching with backing from Shayne Coplan, founder and CEO of Polymarket, and Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, Bloomberg reports. The fund—named 5c(c) Capital after the section of the Commodity Exchange Act that governs prediction markets—appears to be among the first VCs explicitly built to invest in companies shaped by that regulatory and market framework.
“We want to capitalize on the second-, third-, and fourth-order effects of what we built ourselves,” the founders wrote in a document reviewed by Bloomberg.
The debut comes amid a wider boom in prediction markets. Since the U.S. presidential election, trading volumes and user counts have risen, and platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi are increasingly used to trade contracts tied to politics, economic indicators and cultural events—effectively converting public sentiment into tradable signals. Polymarket’s markets run on blockchain infrastructure, and large crypto-native firms including Coinbase and Kraken—as well as retail broker Robinhood—have moved into prediction market offerings in recent months.
That expansion is creating opportunities beyond the exchange layer. Startups are emerging to provide data analytics, liquidity provisioning, compliance tooling and other infrastructure services that support prediction markets—a focus 5c(c) intends to target.
According to the Bloomberg-viewed document, 5c(c) Capital aims to raise up to $35 million and deploy capital into roughly 20 early-stage companies over the next two years, prioritizing infrastructure and services around prediction markets rather than the exchanges themselves. Early backers number more than twenty and include a portfolio manager at Millennium Management, several crypto-focused venture firms, and founders from legacy prediction platforms such as PredictIt.
Polymarket declined to comment for the report, and Kalshi did not respond in time for publication.
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