Polymarket has acquired DeFi infrastructure startup Brahma, which wraps its smart account issuance layer into a predictive marketplace now eyeing a $20B valuation and an AI-driven, onchain future.
Summary
- Polymarket has bought Brahma, a DeFi infrastructure startup for programmable smart accounts and automation, in its third acquisition in less than a year as it eyes a $20 billion valuation.
- Brahma will end external relationships and focus on the Polymarket stack, wallet facilitation, deposits, asset routing and token issuance while helping to bring deep capital to niche contracts.
- The deal follows earlier purchases of QCEX and Dome and comes as algorithmic traders and AI bots dominate Polymarket’s trading desks, making strong, low-friction onchain pipelines a competitive necessity.
Polymarket, a blockchain-based prediction market platform currently targeting a valuation of around $20 billion, has acquired Brahma – a DeFi infrastructure focused on programmable smart accounts and onchain execution automation – for an undisclosed sum, Fortune reported on Wednesday. The agreement marks Polymarket’s third known acquisition in less than a year and represents a deliberate strategic shift: the company is not only expanding its user base, it is acquiring a technological substrate to build a more sophisticated onchain financial product.
Brahma was founded in 2021 by Alessandro Tenconi, Akanshu Jain, and Bapi Reddy Karri, and serves as a full release layer for DeFi. Rather than acting as a traditional crypto wallet, Brahma provides a smart account infrastructure that allows users – and private agents – to integrate complex DeFi transactions, including swapping, lending, tying, and sending collateral, into one manageable flow. The platform has processed more than 1 billion in transaction volume for more than 13,000 accounts and secured more than $100 million in user assets, all without a single publicly disclosed security incident. Its list of investors includes Framework Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Maven 11 Capital, and Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe).
According to a ChainCatcher report citing Fortune, Brahma will suspend its existing projects with other partners following the acquisition. Its team will integrate into Polymarket with a specific mandate: to improve the user experience in all wallet creation, asset deposits and conversions, as well as token exchange, while using Brahma’s DeFi technology to bring capital to Polymarket’s contract markets.
Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan – who became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 27 following a $2 billion strategic investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in October 2025, which valued Polymarket at $9 billion – said the Brahma team has the ability to “design, operate, and scale complex products”. Polymarket is now reportedly seeking a new round of funding that could increase its valuation to $20 billion, up from the $9 billion set in ICE’s investment.
The acquisition is Polymarket’s most infrastructure-focused move to date. Its previous deals include QCEX, a US-licensed derivatives exchange that allowed the platform to re-enter the American market following previous regulatory difficulties, and Dome, a Y Combinator-backed startup that is building a unified API layer for prediction markets, acquired in February 2026. implementation.
Most importantly, Polymarket has been working on blockchain architecture rather than the fiat-based systems used by its main competitor Kalshi. The acquisition of Brahma deepens that traditional advantage of onchain, especially as the prediction markets are increasingly attracting algorithmic traders and bots driven by AI – a trend recently documented by Phemex, which found that bots dominate the most efficient accounts in Polymarket, emphasizing the growing importance of a programmable infrastructure, which works with minimal friction.
The deal comes at a time of intense scrutiny of the broader speculation markets. Polymarket has faced questions about insider trading — most notably when one account made a $553,000 bet on Iran-related events shortly before its top leader was assassinated in February. Coplan acknowledged that the platform faces increasing problems as it grows. Acquiring Brahma’s strong, agent-based infrastructure suggests that the company is preparing for a future where its markets are not just human predictors, but a more dense ecosystem of automated participants.
