“We pivoted away [from] our evergreen strategy to basically be all in on World Cup,” Maman told me in an interview last week.
What came next was the clearest illustration of how Kalshi’s marketing actually works. When Erling Haaland emerged as a cultural phenomenon mid-tournament, the team had a simple idea: a lookalike contest. Maman said it went from idea to execution within a week. Roughly 200 fans showed up in Miami for the event, hosted by the internet’s favorite lookalike, Emma Kate Willman, and the winner walked away with two tickets to that day’s match. “It blew up on social media,” Maman said proudly.
Within days, Kalshi was running a Messi lookalike contest in New York for the final, hosted by a former Argentine taxi driver who’d been told for years he had the face for it.
Behind the stunts is a larger thesis that Kalshi arrived at through data rather than theory: AI, paradoxically, may be bringing back the monoculture. The more the internet fills with synthetic content, the more valuable the live, unrepeatable human moment becomes. Maman and Brandon Beckhardt, who runs growth for Kalshi, told Fortune about their somewhat accidental discovery as the World Cup exceeded all of their expectations — and how they chased the moment when it arrived.
The ‘chronically online’ war room
The team operates off a read of what’s working, not off a calendar. Beckhardt likened it to a war room, or even a news bullpen. It’s roughly 20 people, most of them young, all of them “chronically online,” he said.
“We essentially just stood in a room, closed the door, and just go — nobody’s leaving this room until we come up with 10 awesome ideas,” Beckhardt said. The team screens hires on whether “they have the dog in them,” he added, prioritizing grit and creativity over polished résumés. “Alan is on the numbers like a hog,” Beckhardt said of his colleague, meaning the pace of all of this is partly a function of someone watching dashboards closely enough to know when to sprint.
When asked how much of the operation is AI versus old-fashioned human intuition and listening to your gut, Maman paused. “We use AI to the extent where it’s very practical, but I would probably put the ratio at 80% intuition, 20% maybe AI from a helpfulness standpoint.” He added that Kalshi was able to pivot and drive engagement on the World Cup because they have such a lean team.
The team’s most viral asset isn’t a market or a data tool. It’s a mobile robot named BingBot that Kalshi has been deploying as a cultural party crasher: outside Madison Square Garden during the NBA Finals, at World Cup events, and in Washington, D.C., for America’s 250th birthday. BingBot maintains its own TikTok and Instagram accounts, and Beckhardt said it generated roughly half a billion organic views around the NBA Finals alone.
“Some of our best-performing content was putting the robot out with the fans celebrating outside of MSG,” he said. “People just love that, seeing everyone come together and celebrate. It’s a very human side of things, which ironically a robot was a part of.”
University of Chicago economist Alex Imas, whose research I mentioned to the Kalshi team during our interview, has suggested that scarcity will move toward more “human” and “relational” skills in the AI age, as people want AI-proof experiences.
When reached for comment, Imas said he was “working on this idea in a number of different ways,” and agreed that Kalshi’s experiments with real-word virality seem to support his thesis: “one thing I’ve found is demand for experiences and live events is through the roof.” As AI floods the internet with synthetic content, authentic human moments become scarce, and scarcity creates value, he added. Imas expects “only increasing interest in live events and experiences — tech is just so everywhere, people will be saturated with it.”
The explosion of interest in live events also recalls the “hidden markets” thesis described by Wharton economist Judd Kessler in his book, Lucky By Design, in which he argues that many experiences are actually far underpriced, and true price discovery happens in a hidden market that is just out of sight. One example he offers is a credit-card tier that allow first dibs on restaurant reservations. One service Kalshi is offering may be to illuminate a previously hidden market. Kessler declined to comment for this article.
Read more FIFA’s $15 billion World Cup payday shows commercialization is the real tournament champion
The rebuilding of the monoculture?
Kalshi’s marketing team arrived at the same conclusion by being chronically online and following the data to where it led: human-scale, participatory moments.
The numbers from the tournament are hard to argue with. World Cup volume on the platform climbed from $6.67 billion by June 22 to $24.2 billion by July 14, according to data shared with Fortune throughout the tournament. By July 15, the “FIFA World Cup Winner” market alone had surpassed $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, Kalshi’s valuation reportedly doubled from $11 billion in December 2025 to $22 billion by March 2026, then reached $40 billion by late June amid early IPO discussions, while annualized revenue passed $2 billion.
But perhaps the most revealing figure is one mentioned at the end of our call: roughly 75% of people who visit Kalshi aren’t trading at all. Kalshi is seeing people go on prediction markets increasingly as a data source, to see the state of the zeitgeist based on the wisdom of crowds. Bloomberg has begun integrating Kalshi data directly into its terminal because market moves sometimes arrive before the news does.
Maman raised a version of the idea that AI could be bringing back a monoculture. He has noticed that Kalshi’s volume spikes cluster tightly around live events, such as the World Cup, football season, midterms, and award ceremonies. The emerging pattern shows that the moments when Americans want to know in real time what everyone else believes tend to be the same moments they’re all watching the same thing.
That’s the inverse of what the internet was supposed to do. The web fragmented shared experience and AI was supposed to accelerate that fragmentation. The Kalshi data suggests at least the possibility of a counter-reaction — that as synthetic content floods the feed, collective live moments become more valuable, not less. “It does seem, at least to us, that there is this kind of swell of activity and coming together as a culture for these big events,” Maman said. When I pressed him on whether AI might be bringing back the tentpole moment, he was careful: “It could be the path we go down. It’s hard to say.”
External data offers further support: Wembley Stadium will host a record 3 million concertgoers this summer, about 1 million more than last year, and industry tracker Pollstar recorded double-digit growth in stadium shows worldwide in 2025. Prediction markets, by putting a tradeable price on outcomes in real time, make those collective moments even more legible — a live ticker for what people actually believe.
This makes Kalshi something between a newsroom and a financial market and a cultural thermometer. The company holds a “designated contract market” designation from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the same regulatory status as traditional commodity exchanges. But it is fighting on multiple legal fronts simultaneously, as the CFTC is moving to bar contracts on injuries, officiating calls and other “discrete-action” sports outcomes, even while defending game-outcome contracts.
Kentucky has sued over allegedly unlicensed sports betting; the CFTC has countersued to assert federal jurisdiction. Kalshi recently paused flight-cancellation contracts, a sign the company is still actively negotiating where its own edges are.
When asked if Kalshi is misunderstood, Beckhardt responded that it is a “fundamentally new” kind of thing, “and like any new thing, it’s going to be misunderstood.” This means, he added, that it offers many “really positive things,” as well as “some negative things you have to kind of figure out and deal with as a society.”
The dominance of sports, in his opinion, contributes to the confusion. “When we talk internally, we really consider ourselves [to be] building the next-generation financial exchange, and that spans across everything. It is sports, but it’s important geopolitical questions and cultural questions and economic questions.”
What’s not in dispute is that Kalshi has figured out something about attention in 2026. The human thing — even if it’s “that dog in you” — is the thing that matters.
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