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Polymarket Hires Former Uber Executive To Lead Growth Initiative

Polymarket has hired a former executive of Uber Technologies (NYSE: $UBER) to lead its growth initiative.

The prediction market said that Travis VanderZanden will serve as chief growth officer at the company. He previously worked at both Uber and Lyft (NASDAQ: $LYFT).

Most recently, VanderZanden founded Bird, the electric scooter sharing startup company.

VanderZanden is known to be a proponent of the “blitzscaling” trend that prioritizes extremely rapid growth at startup companies.

Venture capitalist Reid Hoffman popularized the term blitzscaling to describe startups that raise and spend large amounts of money to fund aggressive expansion while grabbing market share.

The hiring of VanderZanden comes as Polymarket looks to grow and expand this autumn with the NFL football season, and ahead of a potential initial public offering (IPO).

The hiring also comes as Polymarket looks to keep pace with rival prediction market Kalshi, which has pulled ahead in terms of growth in recent months.

In July, Polymarket registered $12.9 billion U.S. in trading volume compared to Kalshi’s $40 billion U.S., according to data from each company.

Kalshi is said to have an edge over Polymarket because of its robust sports betting markets.

Polymarket also faces rising competition from cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase Global (NASDAQ: $COIN) and Gemini (NASDAQ: $GEMI) that have launched their own prediction markets.

Polymarket is said to be in talks aimed at raising a new funding at a valuation of $20 billion U.S.

As a privately held company, Polymarket’s stock does not trade on a public exchange.