prediction markets crossed $13 billion in monthly global volume by late 2025 — a more than tenfold increase from 2024. Kalshi alone processed $24 billion in annual trading volume, with 87% of that volume coming from sports event contracts. Robinhood’s event markets reached $300 million ARR, described internally as the company’s fastest-growing segment. Kalshi’s Super Bowl LX volume surged 2,700% year-over-year to exceed $1 billion in a single event.
And yet: not one major prediction market platform has a sports CRM, a betslip-style UX, player segmentation, reactivation triggers, event-driven engagement automation, or responsible gambling guardrails equivalent to what any mid-tier traditional sportsbook runs as standard infrastructure. The fastest-growing segment in US fintech is, operationally, a sports product being served by financial trading software built for a different user entirely.
This article maps the B2B tooling landscape across prediction market exchange infrastructure, data providers, compliance vendors, and operator-facing CRM — and identifies where the sports-native gap sits, why it persists, and why the window to fill it is narrow.
The Core ParadoxSports Dominate Prediction Markets — But the Infrastructure Doesn’t Know It
When Kalshi received CFTC approval to list sports event contracts in January 2025, it launched as a niche expansion of a political and financial prediction platform. By December 2025, sports contracts were generating $331 million in a single month and accounted for 90% of total trading volume during football season. The platform had, functionally, become a sports product — without a single sports-native operator feature to show for it.
The numbers tell a consistent story across every major PM operator. Robinhood’s event markets hit $300 million ARR as its fastest-growing segment, driven overwhelmingly by sports contracts, while users navigate a generic financial trading interface designed for equity and options traders. Kalshi’s March Madness volume reached $208 million for a single tournament. Its valuation doubled during 2025 to $11 billion, supported by a $1 billion December fundraise — capital directed toward exchange infrastructure, not operator-facing sports tooling.
The paradox is structural. PM platforms were built and regulated as financial exchanges. Their UI paradigm is the trading terminal: contract price, order book, position management. Sports bettors expect moneyline odds, event cards, same-game parlays, and favorites-first sorting. The gap between what users encounter and what converts them into retained, high-LTV bettors is the entire vocabulary of sports operator UX — none of which any PM platform has built, and none of which any current B2B vendor offers as a packaged solution for PM operators.
What B2B Tooling Actually Exists — and What’s Missing
The prediction market B2B market is active but almost entirely focused on exchange-layer infrastructure — the plumbing beneath the operator, not the tooling facing the user.
NinjaTrader Connect, launched in March 2026 a year after Kraken’s $1.5 billion acquisition, provides exchange connectivity infrastructure for PM operators building on crypto-adjacent rails. Polymarket’s acquisition of Dome, a unified prediction market API backed by Y Combinator, addresses exchange aggregation and order routing. ICE and NYSE committed $2 billion into Polymarket, signaling institutional conviction in exchange-layer infrastructure buildout. Polymarket’s $112 million acquisition of QCX, a CFTC-registered derivatives clearing organization, adds compliance infrastructure at the clearing layer.
What is absent across all of these transactions is operator-facing sports tooling: the CRM hooks, player segmentation models, event-driven engagement triggers, betslip UX, and lifecycle management tools that traditional sportsbook operators have used for a decade to convert casual sports fans into retained bettors.
| B2B Layer | Vendors Active | Sports-Native Tooling? |
|---|---|---|
| Exchange / clearing infrastructure | NinjaTrader Connect, QCX (Polymarket), Dome API | No |
| Turnkey PM platform (B2B) | TRUEiGTECH | No |
| Sports data / settlement | Sportradar, SportsDataIO | Partial (data only) |
| Compliance / surveillance | Palantir + TWG AI (Polymarket, bespoke) | No |
| Player CRM / engagement | None | Unserved |
| Betslip UX / odds formatting | None | Unserved |
TRUEiGTECH unveiled an enterprise-grade turnkey prediction market platform for B2B operators in early 2026, signaling growing vendor awareness of the operator tooling gap. But even this most operator-facing of the current vendors does not address sports-specific engagement: no bettor segmentation, no event CRM, no lifecycle triggers, no responsible gambling guardrails calibrated to sports betting behavior patterns.
Traditional sports betting B2B vendors — odds compilers, risk management platforms, player CRMs like Optimove and Braze integrations — have not pivoted to serve PM operators. The regulatory classification difference (CFTC-regulated financial exchange vs. state-regulated sportsbook) has been enough to keep the two ecosystems separated, even as their end users have become functionally identical.
Data FragmentationLeague Data Integration: Three Deals Signed, Four Major Leagues Waiting
Sports prediction markets require two categories of data infrastructure that traditional financial derivatives do not: official event settlement data (who won, what was the score, did the player score the touchdown) and integrity monitoring (is the trading pattern on this contract consistent with inside information about the outcome).
As of early 2026, only three major US sports leagues — the NHL, MLS, and UFC — have established formal data frameworks that allow official data to flow to prediction market exchanges for settlement and integrity purposes. The NFL, NBA, MLB, and NCAA — the four largest sports by betting handle in the US — remain unaligned with PM data infrastructure.
Sportradar is the primary B2B data infrastructure play in the PM space, holding official data rights for the NHL, MLS, and UFC. Its 2025 revenue reached €1.29 billion, up 17% year-over-year, with PM revenue in 2026 expected to contribute “tens of millions” — material but still excluded from formal financial guidance, indicating the PM data market is being established rather than captured. Sportradar’s acquisition of IMG Arena added 70+ rights holders and coverage of over one million annual events, providing the long-tail sports settlement infrastructure that PM operators targeting niche events will need. But Sportradar’s PM offering addresses data delivery and integrity monitoring — not operator engagement tooling.
SportsDataIO has positioned itself as an early mover explicitly targeting prediction market platforms with settlement and resolution data, probability APIs, and analytical modeling across 13+ sports. It is one of the few B2B vendors that has publicly acknowledged PM operators as a distinct customer segment and built product around their specific data needs. The gap it does not address is identical to Sportradar’s: operator-facing CRM, player lifecycle management, and sports-native engagement tooling remain unserved.
Polymarket Had to Build Integrity Tooling From Scratch — Nobody Should Have To
In 2025, Polymarket partnered with Palantir and TWG AI to build sports market surveillance infrastructure. The requirement was straightforward: monitor trading patterns on sports event contracts for anomalies consistent with inside information about game outcomes, player injuries, or officiating decisions. This is a solved problem in traditional sports betting — every major sportsbook runs integrity monitoring via vendors like Sportradar, IBIA, or in-house systems refined over years of PASPA-era development.
Polymarket built it from scratch because no native B2B solution existed for PM operators. The bespoke approach — a $112 million acquisition of QCX for clearing plus custom Palantir surveillance tooling — represents the compliance tax that every new PM operator with serious sports volume will face unless a standardized B2B layer emerges.
The compliance challenge extends beyond integrity monitoring. PM operators now face a layered regulatory environment where jurisdictional product design, responsible gambling obligations, and AML/KYC requirements vary by state and by the specific CFTC designation of each contract type. An operator launching in 2026 without B2B compliance tooling that abstracts this complexity will spend more on regulatory infrastructure than on product development.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup — 48 teams, 104 matches, running from June through July — is the first major stress test for PM compliance infrastructure at scale. It will expose every gap simultaneously: settlement speed, KYC/AML throughput at peak volume, responsible gambling triggers for high-frequency bettors during a multi-week tournament, and integrity monitoring across dozens of markets per match. Operators who have not solved these infrastructure problems before June 2026 will solve them publicly and expensively during the tournament itself.
A Dozen Operators, No Shared Infrastructure — The Middleware Opportunity
The current PM operator landscape includes Kalshi, Robinhood, Polymarket, PrizePicks, Underdog, FanDuel (via partnership), DraftKings (via partnership), Fanatics, and Betr — each building separate PM products without shared B2B infrastructure standards, vendor relationships, or operator tooling protocols. This is not a market that has evaluated sports-native middleware and rejected it. It is a market that has not yet been offered it.
The capital concentration in this space is significant: Kalshi’s $11 billion valuation (doubled during 2025) and $1 billion December fundraise signal that operators have the budget to solve infrastructure problems. They are currently solving them through acquisitions and partnerships — Polymarket buying QCX, DraftKings and FanDuel entering PM through league partnerships — rather than via purpose-built B2B sports PM tooling. This confirms the gap is unserved by existing vendors, not that operators have chosen to build internally as a strategic preference.
Winner-takes-most dynamics at the exchange layer — liquidity concentrating on the deepest markets — mean that B2B tooling vendors who operate above the exchange layer have structurally durable positioning. A vendor who delivers sports-native operator capabilities (CRM, personalization, compliance abstraction) as a layer on top of any exchange has no dependency on which exchange wins. Every operator needs what they provide, regardless of exchange preference.
The fragmented operator landscape creates compounding inefficiency at exactly the right moment: when the market is growing fast enough to make the inefficiency expensive, but early enough that no incumbent B2B player has locked in the standards. This is precisely the market structure that historically produces a dominant middleware layer. The early sports betting B2B vendors who built operator tooling between 2018 and 2021 — the first three years after PASPA repeal — captured revenue shares they still hold today.
The B2B PlaybookWhat Sports-Native PM Tooling Actually Needs to Cover
The tooling gap is not abstract. It maps to specific, concrete operator needs that every PM platform with serious sports volume will eventually have to address — either by building, buying, or contracting for them.
Odds Formatting and Event Display
PM platforms display binary contract prices — a “Yes” contract trading at $0.62 means an implied 62% probability. Sports bettors expect moneyline odds (−150 / +120), point spreads, and totals displayed in familiar format. Converting between probability-based contract pricing and sports betting odds formats, and presenting event markets in sports-native UI conventions, is a solved technical problem — but one that no current PM platform has implemented and no B2B vendor offers as a packaged module.
Player Lifecycle Management
No PM platform has bettor segmentation, reactivation triggers, deposit nudges, or responsible gambling guardrails equivalent to what a mid-tier sportsbook CRM provides. The entire infrastructure of player lifecycle management — identifying high-value bettors, reactivating churned users, triggering engagement around upcoming events relevant to individual betting history, flagging problem gambling indicators — is absent from the PM operator stack. Traditional sportsbook B2B CRM vendors have not adapted their products for PM regulatory and UX contexts.
Event-Driven CRM Triggers
Real-time in-play events — an injury, a weather delay, a score change that shifts a game’s expected final outcome — are the natural engagement moments around which sports CRM automation is built. PM platforms currently ignore them entirely. An operator who can trigger a push notification to a user who has bet on a team’s game, at the moment a key player exits with an injury, is delivering the product feature that converts casual users into retained, high-frequency bettors.
Settlement and Resolution Infrastructure
Accurate, fast settlement data across 13+ sports is the foundational operational requirement for any PM sports operator. SportsDataIO is one of the few vendors explicitly targeting this need. Sportradar holds official data rights for aligned leagues. The gap is that neither vendor bundles settlement data with the operator engagement layer — leaving operators to integrate data feeds and build their own engagement automation separately.
Compliance Abstraction
A B2B layer that handles jurisdictional rules, AML/KYC triggers, responsible gambling flags, and CFTC reporting requirements across US states removes the single largest barrier to PM operator launch and scale. No current vendor provides this as a packaged solution for sports PM operators specifically. The $500 billion-plus in US sports betting handle since PASPA repeal has produced mature compliance tooling for the sportsbook context — none of it has been adapted for the PM regulatory environment.
Market TimingWhy the Window Opens Now — and Closes Fast
Sportradar’s PM revenue in 2026 is expected in “tens of millions” — real, but still excluded from formal financial guidance. This is a precise signal that the PM B2B data market is being established in 2026, not already captured. The same is true across every other B2B layer: vendors are entering, standards are not yet set, and no incumbent has locked in the operator relationships that will define the market for the next decade.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is a nine-month forcing function. Operators who enter the tournament without sports-native tooling — without fast settlement infrastructure, without event-driven CRM automation, without compliance systems scaled for peak tournament volume — will visibly underperform relative to those who do not. That underperformance will create urgent demand for the B2B solutions that solve it, at exactly the moment when operators have both the budget and the motivation to buy rather than build.
First-mover B2B vendors who establish league data connectors, operator CRM hooks, and compliance abstractions before NFL, NBA, and MLB reach PM data alignment will define the integration standards that subsequent vendors must conform to. In a market with winner-takes-most dynamics at the exchange layer, the integration standard advantage at the operator tooling layer is durable.
The parallel to early US sports betting B2B is instructive, not merely analogous. Vendors who built operator tooling between 2018 and 2021 — in the first three years after PASPA legalization opened the market — captured revenue shares and operator relationships they still hold today. The PM market is at an equivalent inflection point. Global PM volume grew more than tenfold in 2025, to $13 billion per month. The volume is real. The operator tooling is not. That gap does not close itself.
Data Sources & References
- Next Event Horizon: Prediction Markets Have Big US Ambitions But Are Mostly Sports Betting — Kalshi 87%/90% sports volume share, $24B annual volume
- Insights4VC: Prediction Markets at Scale 2026 — $13B/month global volume, $11B Kalshi valuation, $300M Robinhood ARR, 2,700% Super Bowl growth
- Front Office Sports: Prediction Markets Exploded in 2025 — $331M Kalshi December sports volume, $2B ICE/NYSE Polymarket investment, $1B Kalshi fundraise, league data partnerships
- KPMG: Current State of Prediction Markets — $208M March Madness volume
- SBC Americas: Sportradar Growth in Prediction Markets — Sportradar €1.29B 2025 revenue, PM revenue “tens of millions,” IMG Arena acquisition
- SportsDataIO — 13+ sports coverage, settlement/resolution data, probability APIs for PM platforms
- CFTC regulatory filings — Polymarket QCX acquisition ($112M), Kalshi sports contract approval (January 2025)