Jackson Semenas has spent four years building quantitative models to trade prediction markets. Now he is building the Bloomberg Terminal for them. His startup, Klyo Markets, is a pre-launch platform promising to centralize tick data, fair value calculations, and volatility term structures for event contracts traded on venues like Kalshi and Polymarket [klyomarkets.com, September 2026]. The bet is that a growing class of professional traders will pay for institutional-grade analytics in a market currently served by retail interfaces and fragmented data.
The quant's wedge
Semenas, a quantitative trader and the founder of JS Financials, is pursuing an honours degree in finance, economics, and statistics at the Australian National University [LinkedIn, September 2026]. His public work includes a bespoke trading system designed to profit from prediction markets, a project that landed him in a national news segment [SBS News, 2026]. Klyo is the commercial extension of that research. The platform's proposed outputs,fair value, cross-venue normalization, liquidity depth,are the foundational metrics a systematic trader needs to build and backtest strategies. It is a product built by a practitioner for practitioners, aiming to turn noisy quotes into what the company calls "signals you can trade on" [klyomarkets.com, September 2026].
The institutional data gap
Prediction markets for political and economic events have seen steady growth, with platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi attracting volume. Yet the trading experience remains largely retail. Professional asset managers and quantitative funds eyeing the space face a data problem. Quotes are scattered across separate venues, historical tick data is not standardized, and there are no centralized feeds for volatility surfaces or liquidity metrics. Klyo aims to fill that gap. Its initial focus on Kalshi and Polymarket targets the two most prominent regulated and unregulated venues, suggesting a pragmatic launch strategy that captures the bulk of available liquidity.
The competitive landscape for prediction market analytics is nascent. The primary competition comes from the venues themselves, which provide basic charting, and from traders building their own internal tools.
| Competitor | Primary Focus | Klyo's Proposed Edge |
|---|---|---|
| Polymarket | Event contract exchange | Cross-venue data aggregation & institutional analytics |
| Kalshi | Regulated event contract exchange | Advanced metrics like volatility term structure & fair value |
Klyo's differentiation rests on being venue-agnostic and offering a suite of professional tools from day one. The risk is that the total addressable market for such tools remains small until prediction markets attract more institutional capital.
The solo founder risk
Klyo Markets is a classic solo-founder venture at the pre-seed stage, with no verifiable funding rounds or institutional investors yet disclosed. Semenas's relevant trading experience is a strength, but scaling a B2B data platform requires more than quant prowess. The challenges are multifaceted:
- Commercial execution. Selling data feeds and analytics to funds is a relationship-heavy enterprise sales motion, a discipline separate from quantitative research.
- Product scope. The website lists analytics for sports betting and pre-IPO equity trading alongside prediction markets [LinkedIn, September 2026]. This tripling of the initial market could dilute focus or signal an ambitious roadmap searching for product-market fit.
- Funding runway. Without disclosed capital, the company's ability to hire engineering talent or secure necessary data licenses is an open question.
The company is currently gathering waitlist sign-ups, a low-commitment way to gauge demand. Traction will be measured by who signs up and, later, who pays. For now, Klyo is a hypothesis wrapped in a landing page, backed by a founder who has publicly demonstrated the core analytical capability. The next check to look for is a pre-seed round, ideally from an investor with fintech or quantitative trading experience. When that round lands, watch the valuation and the named angels. Will they be fellow quants, or operators who have scaled B2B data businesses? The answer will signal whether the market is betting on the model or the platform.
Sources
- [klyomarkets.com, September 2026] Klyo Markets homepage | https://klyomarkets.com/
- [LinkedIn, September 2026] Jackson Semenas profile | https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackson-semenas-4285b937b
- [SBS News, 2026] Feature on prediction markets and automated trading | https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/article/prediction-markets-betting/keoixyv9o