Novig: The $75M Startup That Wants to Make Every Sportsbook Obsolete
The house always wins because nobody built a market where it didn't have to be involved. Novig just did.
What Novig Actually Is
There’s a number every sports bettor knows and most don’t think about: the vig. It’s the commission a sportsbook takes on every bet, baked into the odds before you ever place a wager. On a coin flip, you’d expect 50/50. A sportsbook offers you something closer to 47/53 that gap is the vig. On most platforms, it runs between 5% and 10%. Over time, it makes it nearly impossible for recreational bettors to be profitable. The house doesn’t need to be right. It just needs to be in the middle.
Novig was founded to remove the middle.
The New York-based company operates a commission-free, peer-to-peer sports prediction market using an order-book model. Rather than betting against a house that sets fixed odds, Novig users trade contracts against each other at market-driven prices. There’s no vig baked into the spread, no house edge, and no limit on winning players a practice traditional sportsbooks use to cut off anyone who gets too good. The name is a play on the term itself: no vig.
<cite index=”103-1”>On February 18, 2026, Novig announced the close of a $75 million Series B round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Multicoin Capital, Makers Fund, Edge Equity, and existing investors Forerunner Ventures, Perceptive Ventures, and NFX. The round brings total capital raised to more than $105 million and followed a period of explosive growth: a 10x increase in trading volume during 2025.</cite>
Then, on June 17, 2026, Novig received CFTC approval as a designated contract market one of the fastest DCM designations in CFTC history, completed in less than seven months. That approval gives the company the same federal regulatory designation as Kalshi, the current market leader, and clears a path to operate sports prediction markets in all 50 states under a single national compliance framework.
The founding team: <cite index=”104-1”>Co-founders Jacob Fortinsky (CEO) and Kelechi Ukah (CTO) built Novig from the ground up as a sports-first exchange.</cite> Fortinsky came to prediction markets intellectually tracking the 2016 election and Brexit referendum in high school and studying how markets aggregate information better than pundits. Ukah brings the engineering depth to build the exchange infrastructure. They’re not gambling executives who stumbled into prediction markets. They built the product from first principles: what would a fair sports market look like if you designed it like a financial exchange?
<cite index=”103-1”>Novig’s annualized trading volume exceeds $4 billion, with the company reporting more than $5 billion in cumulative volume.</cite> Monthly volume recently crossed $300 million. The platform currently operates in 42 states.
The Market : Why Sports Is the Right Prediction Market Wedge
The U.S. online sports betting industry is one of the fastest-growing consumer financial markets in the world. <cite index=”104-1”>DraftKings’ handle alone topped $53 billion during fiscal year 2025.</cite> The total U.S. sports betting market is estimated at $150-200 billion in annual handle and growing rapidly as more states legalize and digital adoption accelerates.
Here’s the structural fact that makes Novig’s timing compelling: sports already dominates prediction market trading, even on platforms that weren’t built for it. <cite index=”111-1”>By some estimates, sports accounts for between 80% and 90% of all trading across prediction market exchanges.</cite> Kalshi, which started with political and economic contracts, now derives the majority of its volume from sports. Polymarket, built for crypto and election markets, sees the same pattern. Sports is the demand. But the dominant prediction market infrastructure wasn’t built with sports traders in mind.
That’s the gap Novig is filling.
The macro environment is also moving in Novig’s direction. A 2024 court ruling gave Kalshi the green light to offer sports event contracts under CFTC oversight, which triggered a wave of new entrants applying for DCM status. <cite index=”104-1”>The stocks of FanDuel parent Flutter Entertainment and DraftKings have both fallen by more than 50% in the last six months</cite> as the market reprices the competitive threat from federally regulated prediction markets.
Traditional sportsbooks built their moats on state-by-state licensing, brand recognition, and distribution. A federally regulated prediction market exchange needs one license the CFTC DCM designation to operate nationally. That structural difference changes the competitive dynamics entirely.
There’s also a customer quality argument. Sportsbooks are optimized to extract money from recreational bettors and kick out anyone who gets good. Prediction markets are optimized for price discovery. <cite index=”103-1”>Novig reports that its users are 10 times more likely to be profitable than users on traditional sportsbooks, with 23% of Novig users achieving profitability compared to roughly 2% on conventional platforms.</cite> These are company-reported figures not independently verified but they reflect a fundamentally different market structure: one where serious traders are welcome, not banned.
