Melee Lands $3.5 Million in Financing in Bid to Refresh Prediction Markets
The startup prediction markets company Melee raised $3.5 million from a number of investors. This money could help the company with its plans to update its event contracts offering.
The investment round, which was categorized as a preseed raise, including participation from DBA, Variant, and other angel investors. Melee wants to enable users to build their own prediction markets by moving them away from the centralized structure of giants like Kalshi and Polymarket. The operators, not users, usually determine the event contracts that the biggest exchanges in the market offer.
"Melee is a permissionless prediction platform built to scale like the Internet,” according to a recent X post by the company. “Anyone can make a market about anything (fact or opinion).”
By leveraging the creator-driven, boundless potential of the internet, the company is establishing itself as the "next evolution of prediction markets." Melee refers to them as "viral markets."
Melee Verifies Investor Interest in Forecasting Markets
According to its website, Melee is still in waitlist mode, but the young event contracts company is the most recent to demonstrate a crucial thesis: investors are excited about prediction markets and are prepared to put money in them.
Giants Kalshi and Polymarket have raised nine figures in capital this year, increasing their projected valuations to $5 billion and $9 billion, respectively. Prediction markets have already raised $216 million, more than double the 2024 total, just nine months into the year.
Professional investors' hasty support for yes/no exchanges is mostly due to the industry's connections to cryptocurrencies. Because Melee is based on the Solana blockchain, it ticks that box. DBA is a crypto investment firm based in New York that is taking part in Melee's planned fund round.
The People's Power
While there are instances of viral online phenomena infiltrating conventional prediction markets, those businesses don't usually operate that way. Rather, operators like Kalshi and Polymarket depend heavily into contracts tethered to economic data, financial assets, politics, and sports.
Melee wants to change things by giving creators more power. The business guarantees creators a long-term revenue model free from reputational risk. In other words, Melee developers will be motivated to interact favorably with traders, and if they are successful in doing so, they will make money.
“Combining this creator incentivization structure with viral price mechanics unlocks real-time viral markets. Much like the phenomenon of meme tokens, creators will naturally compete to make markets about cultural events as they happen, leading to better and more creative markets at scale,” according to an X post by the company.
