Polymarket Opens $5 Trillion Private Market To Retail Investors

CryptoProwl

Tue, May 19, 2026 at 3:47 PM EDT 1 min read

Polymarket has opened a lucrative area of the market to retail investors.

The privately held prediction market is letting users on its platform bet on the future of private companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Polymarket says individual investors now have access to private companies through a new partnership it struck with Nasdaq Private Market, which is providing the data used to resolve contracts.

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Users of Polymarket can now speculate on events surrounding privately held firms, including valuation targets, the timing of initial public offerings (IPOs), and secondary share activity. 

Management at Polymarket says private companies hold more than $5 trillion U.S. in cumulative value and are among the most exciting concerns in the world, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

While traders will not own equity in the private companies, they can take positions on outcomes tied to companies that, until now, have largely remained inaccessible to ordinary investors.

Private-company investing has traditionally been reserved for venture capital firms, institutional investors, and wealthy accredited investors. 

Yet private markets and companies are among the most exciting, with firms such as Stripe having valuations larger than many publicly traded concerns. 

Polymarket added that its new offering turns private-market developments into tradable prediction contracts for retail investors.

Until now, mom and pop investors had to wait for companies to hold their initial public offerings and for their stocks to trade on a public exchange to access their growth opportunities.

Polymarket itself is privately held and its stock does not trade on a public exchange.