Polymarket Partners With Nasdaq Private Market for Private Company Trading

20 May 2026, 15:30 by Vinay Kakkad · KalingaTV

Polymarket stands out as a top blockchain-based prediction platform, where users buy and sell “yes” or “no” contracts to bet on future events in sports, politics, culture, and macroeconomics. Recently, the New York-based company made a big move—it launched its first prediction markets focused on the performance and key milestones of major private companies. Now, regular people can speculate on events tied to high-profile private firms like OpenAI, Stripe, SpaceX, Anthropic, Databricks, and Kraken, all without needing to own any equity.

For precise settlement of these contracts, Polymarket secured an exclusive partnership with Nasdaq Private Market (NPM)—an institutional secondary trading venue known for handling private share transactions. With this agreement, NPM becomes the official resolution data provider, tapping into its comprehensive primary and secondary market data to decide contract outcomes. Users can now trade on concrete, time-specific outcomes: when a company goes public, whether it hits certain valuations, or if there’s secondary share activity. While platforms like Kalshi already let people bet on when prominent startups might file for IPO, Polymarket’s approach digs deeper, giving users new ways to track and trade on broader performance metrics.

This launch comes as startups remain private longer, growing to the size of some public giants. Polymarket points out there are about 1,600 unicorn startups worldwide, together worth more than $5 trillion. Access to this massive pool of value has mostly been reserved for venture capital firms, big institutions, and wealthy, accredited investors. Polymarket’s CEO, Shayne Coplan, calls the new product a way to democratize access to financial information—opening “one of the last frontiers of financial markets” to everyday traders.

But it’s not just about retail. This partnership creates a new public price discovery tool for institutions, which typically rely on rare or delayed private market data. Tom Callahan, Nasdaq Private Market’s CEO, and Rodolfo Sanchez, NPM’s Vice President of Data, both note that trading activity on Polymarket brings instant sentiment signals. Institutional investors can tap into these signals and track private-market performance in real time. The first batch of private-company prediction markets is now up on Polymarket’s platform, and more contracts are on the way.