Novig just pulled in $75M in Series B capital, and if you understand what that actually means, you can hear the tension in every sportsbook executive suite from here to Vegas.
A company named Novig. No vig. No house edge siphoning pennies until they turn into yachts. Just a commission free, peer to peer sports prediction market where traders face each other, not the house. That wordplay is not cute branding. It is the thesis.
Pantera Capital led the round. Multicoin Capital, Makers Fund, and Edge Equity stepped in. Returning firepower from Forerunner, Perceptive Ventures, and NFX. When that lineup wires $75M, it is not for vibes. It is conviction.
Respect to Jacob Fortinsky, Co Founder and CEO, and Kelechi Ukah, Co Founder. Building a trader first sports trading platform in a market addicted to the house model takes more than code. It takes nerve. Since launching in late 2024, Novig has now raised more than $105M. That is not a seedling. That is roots grabbing concrete.
Back at the Series A in August 2025, they raised $18M led by Forerunner with Y Combinator, NFX, Perceptive Ventures, and Gaingels participating. At that point, they had already seen a 50x increase in monthly trading volume and surpassed $2B in annualized volume in Novig Cash since their September 2024 public launch. Read that twice. 50x growth. $2B annualized. And they were just getting warmed up.
Here is the strategic blade hidden in plain sight. Novig has applied for a Designated Contract Market license with the CFTC. If approved, that opens the door to operating as a federally regulated exchange across all 50 states. Not a patchwork of state by state permissions. A national footprint. That is how you stop thinking like a sportsbook and start thinking like infrastructure.
The incumbents make money on the spread. Novig is building a marketplace where price is discovered between participants. That is a structural shift. When you remove hidden fees, remove limits on winners, and design for traders instead of tourists, you do not just improve margins. You change behavior.
For founders watching this, the lesson is clear. Capital follows clarity. Novig did not pitch a feature. They pitched a model. Commission free. Peer to peer. Trader first. Then they executed hard enough to back it up with volume.
For traders and serious sports participants, this is the kind of platform that respects skill. No quiet throttling. No mysterious account limitations. Just markets.
Pantera and crew are betting that sports trading deserves the same structural evolution equities and crypto already went through. The question is not whether sports is big enough. It is whether the old guard can adapt before liquidity starts flowing somewhere new.
