Polymarket Hires Former Goldman Sachs Partner to Steer Institutional Growth

As part of a broader effort to lure more business from institutional market participants, Polymarket announced today that it hired former Goldman Sachs partner Lisa Mantil as head of institutional growth.

In her new role at Polymarket, Mantil, who spent nearly three decades at the largest U.S. investment bank, will work with a variety of non-retail clients. That group will include banks, corporate entities, fund managers and trading firms. The hiring comes as prediction market operators are increasingly focusing on the professional investment community.

Mantil became a partner at Goldman in 2018 and most recently led the bank’s ETF Accelerator program – a platform dedicated to helping asset managers bring new exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to market.

Why Mantil Hiring Matters for Polymarket

As is the case with companies across any other industry, prediction markets are constantly hiring (and firing) people with most staff additions not being newsworthy. Polymarket’s addition of Mantil is, however, noteworthy.

The ability of yes/no exchanges, including Polymarket, to solidify their standing among institutional market participants and professional traders is pivotal at a time when prediction market valuations are ballooning, potentially signaling venture investors are expecting or demanding operators expand use cases to a professional audience while reducing dependence on small retail bettors.

That effort is all the more important against a backdrop of legal murkiness pertaining to sports event contracts, which currently drive most of the volume on yes/no exchanges. Some legal experts believe it’s possible that the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually hand down a ruling barring or significantly limiting sports derivatives.

If that happens, companies such as Polymarket will be forced to pivot to a deeper embrace of products and services that are more appealing to a more sophisticated professional audience. Having Mantil on board could help Polymarket accomplish that objective.

Polymarket Already Wooing Institutional Clients

Polymarket is already endeavoring to capture more institutional business. It has a dedicated platform for those investors and in July, it launched Polymarket Institutional Research — “a publication exploring the intersection of Polymarket with the global financial system.”

In June, Polymarket executed its first institutional block trade, which was a six-figure transaction between two parties consisting of graphic processing units (GPUs), also known as artificial intelligence (AI) compute.