Better Opinions, a Y-Combinator backed company, has raised $2.5Mn from investors including Metaplanet VC and Goldwater Capital. The investors participating in the seed round include YCombinator, Taurus VC, Original Capital, Tremis Capital, Super Capital, and other investors, including angel investors.
Better Opinions is an app that operates in the realm of the prediction market and allows users to trade their opinions with real money on events in various categories such as cricket, cryptocurrency, politics and entertainment. Prediction markets are a relatively new asset class where users can trade on future unknown events and earn money. Since its launch, Better Opinions has expanded from continuous double auction trades, where users can trade on yes/no outcomes, to polls, where users can choose from multiple options to trade. Better Opinions also plans to add a social layer on to trading, to make trading more accessible, fun and educational. Within a span of 6 months, Better Opinions has had over 600,000 users and has covered over 14,000 events.
Better Opinions had previously raised an amount of $700K in their pre-seed round from investors including Soma Capital and Java Capital.
The funds raised will be used to build & expand the product and tech team, towards marketing and user growth. Soumyajit Das, Co-founder CTO, says, “Some of our investors’ portfolio companies include The Boring Company, TikTok, Reddit and Binance. It’s heartwarming to see such investors having faith and belief in our product and team. The funding will also help with our tech and infrastructure scale up plans.”
Samay Jain, Co-founder CEO, Better Opinions, further added, “The funds will also be used to make Better Opinions a trading cum social platform. We have so far seen an excited user base, who are eager to trade and invest in our platform, and their demand for more events and categories is a testament to the potential of our product. Our vision from here is therefore not only to create a stock market of opinions and make trading accessible to all, but to build a social platform where our users can trade and engage”.
Speaking on the investment, Rauno Miljand, Managing Partner, Metaplanet, says, “Better Opinions developed and operated real cash prediction market is contributing greatly to increasing critical and accountable decision-making abilities and financial literacy of their user base. It is rare to see ventures having a positive impact on epistemic hygiene while also appealing to the mass market - Better Opinion is one of few.”
Better Opinions was also part of the W22 batch of YCombinator. The team consists of founders, Samay Jain and Soumyajit Das, who are former employees of Gojek. The team also consists of graduates from IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi and NALSAR, among others.