Exclusive: Polymarket acquires the startup Brahma, in effort to scale its crypto and DeFi infrastructure

Polymarket, one of the two leading prediction market sites, built its platform on blockchain rails—a design that offers efficiency but that can also add a layer of unwanted complexity.  On Wednesday, the fast-growing company took a step that will help it tuck those blockchain elements further into the background: Polymarket announced it is acquiring Brahma, a startup that specializes in providing crypto and DeFi infrastructure for businesses and individuals managing digital assets. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

“Building reliable infrastructure across blockchain networks and traditional financial rails is hard—there are no shortcuts,” said Shayne Coplan, founder and CEO of Polymarket, in an email to Fortune. “The Brahma team has shown they can design, operate and scale complex products for sophisticated users.”

While Polymarket expects the acquisition will improve its user experience, the move also signals the company—which has quickly grown to a reported $20 billion valuation—is doubling down on its crypto roots. Polymarket has been using blockchain rails since its inception, whereas its main competitor Kalshi functions largely with fiat currency. 

One way that Brahma could help Polymarket is by bringing additional liquidity to smaller wagers. Larger event contracts, like those in sports or politics, easily bring lots of money into the pool. But smaller wagers focused on niche areas such as, for instance, the outcome of a bowling match in Spain, struggle to amass a sizable amount of liquidity. Brahma’s experience in DeFi, a decentralized field of crypto defined by rapid trading and users with a high capacity for risk, could help draw in additional capital to more thinly traded contracts.

Alessandro Tenconi, one of the co-founders of Brahma, said in an interview with Fortune that his startup could remove the friction for Polymarket users when it comes to creating a wallet, depositing and converting shares, and redeeming outcome tokens.  

Brahma, started in 2021 by Tenconi and his co-founders Akanshu Jain and Bapi Reddy Karri, has helped both businesses and individuals use DeFi at scale. The startup says that it has processed more than $1 billion in transactions. When it joins Polymarket, Brahma will wind down its projects with other companies and individuals. 

This is not the first time that Polymarket has sought to expand by hiring talent through an acquisition. In February, the prediction market platform acquired Dome, a Y Combinator backed startup, to bolster its developer tools. Polymarket also acquired a boutique executive search firm called Lunch in February.

Tenconi says that one night in September, at 1 AM, he got a Telegram message from someone saying that Coplan, the CEO of Polymarket, wanted to talk to him. Ten minutes later, the two were on a call. He says that Coplan was looking for people who could build fast, build quality, and who had the chops. “It was like builders talking to builders,” Tenconi said, about that first phone call. “The rest happened very naturally.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com