Adjacent raises $2.5M pre-seed from VanEck, Night Capital to build prediction market indices
Adjacent raised a $2.5 million pre-seed round led by VanEck and Night Capital to build prediction market indices, with additional backing from UFO Holdings, Maven11 and Digital Currency Group. The startup is creating standardized reference data and benchmarks for the event-contracts industry. Co-founder Lucas Kohorst discussed the project in a podcast episode published Thursday. The company's first index family, launched around the time of the raise, focuses on the 2024 US elections.
Indices transform prediction markets from a collection of discrete bets into a trackable asset class. For institutional investors, Adjacent's benchmarks make it possible to benchmark portfolio exposure to political or macro outcomes without picking individual contracts. VanEck's involvement signals that fund managers see enough daily volume to justify index products. The playbook mirrors how providers like S&P Global and MSCI built themselves into obligatory infrastructure for equities and fixed income. If Adjacent's election index gains traction, every prediction-market platform will face pressure to supply pricing feeds or risk losing institutional flow to competitors already integrated. The 2024 election timing is deliberate: it captures peak liquidity and attention for a proof of concept that could expand into sports, economic, and geopolitical benchmarks.