The Mets are the first Major League Baseball team to sign a deal with a prediction-market platform, and they didn’t pick Kalshi or Polymarket. They chose Novig.
Terms of the exclusive, multiyear agreement were not disclosed. Under the deal, which will begin this season, Novig will be featured on the outfield wall at Citi Field and have a prominent presence throughout the ballpark and on Mets broadcasts, including through digital signage, LED displays, and more. Novig is now also an “MLB authorized prediction market,” meaning it’s allowed to use official league data under the “integrity framework” established through an agreement between MLB and the CFTC.
“It’s a big milestone, but not just for us,” Novig founder Jacob Fortinsky tells Front Office Sports. “It’s a sign of what’s to come. Major sports organizations are embracing prediction markets.”
Fortinsky says the seeds of the partnership were planted when he met Josh Cohen, the son of Mets owner Steve Cohen, at a recent UFC match in New York City.
“I told him about the business, he was excited about it, and the conversation went from there,” Fortinsky tells FOS.
The 28-year-old, whose company has raised more than $100 million since its 2021 formation, is a lifelong Mets fan who has endured the ups and downs that come with rooting for the franchise—this season the Mets sit in last place in their division. The last time the Mets won the World Series, in 1986, Fortinsky had not yet been born.
“But there’s no more passionate fanbase, and I think there’s no better team in terms of what they represent to the city,” Fortinsky says.
He sees parallels between Novig and the Mets. When people think about prediction markets, the two names that come up first are Kalshi and Polymarket, not Novig.
“There’s an underdog mentality with the Mets, being in the same city with the Yankees,” he says. “In some sense, we’re the underdog coming into the prediction-market space.”
The partnership was reached a little over four months after MLB broke the seal on prediction markets through an exclusive agreement with Polymarket. The Mets held talks with multiple companies and ultimately determined that Novig’s focus on sports, technology, and responsible trading aligned with the organization’s approach to emerging categories, according to the team’s SVP of corporate partnerships Zach Feldman.
“There was immediate connectivity with the Novig team,” Feldman tells FOS. “We loved the fact that they were New York-based, loved their differentiation of being a sports-first company built for sports fans, and shared their mindset of being fan-first and focused on innovation.”
Novig, which recently received federal approval enabling it to expand into all 50 states, previously had a short-term partnership with LIV Golf during this year’s Masters Tournament. Fortinsky has acknowledged that competitors like Kalshi and Polymarket have a first-mover advantage, but says his platform is playing the long game.
Novig focuses only on sports, unlike Kalshi, Polymarket, and other prediction-market platforms that allow users to bet on everything from whether it’ll rain in New York City on a given day to when the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates. Fortinsky points to the fact that Novig has a 21-year-old age requirement for users—something pro leagues like the NFL and NBA have explicitly asked the Trump administration to implement—as one of the reasons the company is well-positioned to outlast competitors.
The Mets are the first MLB franchise to reach a prediction-market deal, but not the first pro sports franchise to get into the prediction-market game. The NHL became the first major pro league to partner with prediction markets in October by making deals with Kalshi and Polymarket. The Blackhawks then reached a separate deal with Kalshi, followed by the Rangers striking an agreement with Polymarket.
