Polymarket acquires DeFi startup Brahma to deepen its onchain stack

Polymarket has acquired DeFi infrastructure startup Brahma, folding its smart-account execution layer into a prediction market now eyeing a $20B valuation and an AI‑driven, onchain future.

Polymarket, the blockchain-based prediction market platform currently eyeing a valuation of approximately $20 billion, has acquired Brahma — a DeFi infrastructure startup focused on programmable smart accounts and onchain execution automation — for an undisclosed sum, Fortune reported on Wednesday. The deal marks Polymarket’s third known acquisition in under a year and signals a deliberate strategic shift: the company is not merely growing its user base, it is acquiring the technical substrate to build a more sophisticated onchain financial product.​

Brahma was co-founded in 2021 by Alessandro Tenconi, Akanshu Jain, and Bapi Reddy Karri, and operates as a full-stack execution layer for DeFi. Rather than functioning as a conventional crypto wallet, Brahma provides a unified smart account infrastructure that allows users — and autonomous agents — to batch complex DeFi transactions, including swaps, lending, bridging, and collateral posting, into a single programmable flow. The platform has processed over $1 billion in transaction volume across more than 13,000 accounts and secured upwards of $100 million in user assets, all without a single publicly disclosed security incident. Its investor roster includes Framework Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Maven 11 Capital, and Safe (formerly Gnosis Safe).​

According to the ChainCatcher report citing Fortune, Brahma will terminate its existing projects with other partners following the acquisition. Its team will integrate into Polymarket with a specific mandate: optimising user experience across wallet creation, asset deposits and conversions, and result token exchanges, while leveraging Brahma’s DeFi expertise to bring greater liquidity to Polymarket’s niche contract markets.​

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan — who became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at age 27 following a $2 billion strategic investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in October 2025, which valued Polymarket at $9 billion — stated that the Brahma team has the capability “to design, operate, and scale complex products”. Polymarket is now reportedly seeking a fresh funding round that could push its valuation to $20 billion, up from the $9 billion set at the ICE investment.

The acquisition is Polymarket’s most infrastructure-oriented move to date. Its previous deals included QCEX, a U.S.-licensed derivatives exchange that enabled the platform’s re-entry into the American market following earlier regulatory difficulties, and Dome, a Y Combinator-backed startup that built a unified API layer for prediction markets, acquired in February 2026. Each acquisition has addressed a different layer of the stack: regulatory access, developer infrastructure, and now onchain execution.​

Crucially, Polymarket has always operated on a blockchain architecture rather than the fiat-based systems used by its main competitor Kalshi. The acquisition of Brahma deepens that native onchain advantage, particularly as prediction markets increasingly attract algorithmic traders and AI-driven bots — a dynamic recently documented by Phemex, which found that bots dominate the top-performing accounts on Polymarket, underscoring the growing importance of programmable, low-friction execution infrastructure.

The deal arrives at a moment of intense scrutiny for prediction markets broadly. Polymarket has faced questions about insider trading — most visibly when a single account made $553,000 betting on events related to Iran just before its supreme leader was killed in February. Coplan has acknowledged the platform faces growing backlash as it scales. Acquiring Brahma’s robust, agent-native infrastructure suggests the company is preparing for a future in which its markets serve not just human forecasters, but a much denser ecosystem of automated participants.