River Markets announces $8.5M seed round. River Markets, building prime brokerage for prediction markets, led by Oscar Levy and Antonin Parrot, has announced $8.5M seed round led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, UFO Holdings, Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), TENET, Humbition, Kima Ventures, Cherry Ventures, Stack Asset Management, Perpetual Strategies, Mark Kornfilt, Jacob Fortinsky (Novig), and other amazing angel investors from Citadel, Google, HRT, Tower Research Capital, NVIDIA, FalconX, Exodus Point and JP Morgan. Prediction markets need financial infrastructure. Event contracts are changing how markets trade information and express views on the future. But while prediction markets have grown rapidly, the infrastructure behind them has not kept pace. Professional traders still operate across fragmented venues, with separate accounts, APIs, balances, and risk systems. New integrations can take months, while capital and risk remain fragmented across platforms. Direct experience trading prediction markets exposed a clear infrastructure gap. River Markets was built to address it, providing trading firms with unified execution and risk across prediction-market venues through a single platform. The platform launched on May 1 with trading teams including several of the top 10 traders by volume on Kalshi and Polymarket, and is already used by leading prediction-market hedge funds and proprietary trading firms. Execution and risk are live today, with the next phase focused on improving capital efficiency and enabling significantly greater trading scale. Prediction markets need more than better consumer interfaces. They need institutional-grade financial infrastructure. That infrastructure is now being built. Remote Hire With Us: Menlo Talent helps technology companies hire exceptional remote talent from India. Build your team with carefully curated engineers, product leaders, designers, GTM professionals, and more. Learn More At: https://www.menlotimes.com/menlo-talent

River Markets announced Tuesday it raised $8.5 million in a seed round led by Haun Ventures. Y Combinator and Coinbase Ventures also participated in the fundraise, which closed in July. The startup provides a platform that allows professional traders to trade across multiple prediction markets from a single interface. Co-founded by CEO Oscar Levy and CTO Antonin Parrot, River Markets launched in May and is on track to exceed hundreds of millions of dollars in annualised trading volume by year-end. The funding will be used to hire engineers, build faster trading systems, and expand sales and operations teams. The announcement reflects growing institutional interest in prediction markets as financial tools for hedging risks and trading on economic events.

British hedge fund Qube Research & Tech first to set up shop in GIFT SEZ. High-frequency trading firm to get tax sops on derivative trades. QRT expected to launch a Category III fund in GIFT City that allows sophisticated trading strategies. (Image: Bloomberg) London-headquartered high-frequency trader (HFT) Qube Research & Technologies (QRT) is setting up operations in GIFT City, providing a boost to the country's only International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), which aims to position itself as a hub for global trading firms. The British fund - often described in market circles as a secretive hedge fund due to its low public profile and proprietary trading operations - has got in-principle approval from the IFSC Authority (IFSCA) to register as a fund management entity. It will be the first global HFT to set up in the special economic zone (SEZ). "In addition to our Mumbai office, we are in the process of establishing an office in GIFT City," QRT confirmed, but did not provide further details. Emailed queries sent to the IFSCA remained unanswered at the time of publication.