Jacob Fortinsky, NoVig CEO, posted this at 9:35 this morning.
"We just crossed $1 billion in trading volume on Novig — five weeks after launching our prediction market. Onward."
Jacob Fortinsky, co-founder and CEO of Novig, on X, September 15, 2026
One billion dollars. Novig went live nationwide on August 4, cleared more than $125 million in its first week, and is now claiming a ten-figure number before we've even played a second Sunday of the NFL season.
The easy read is that a scandalous ad campaign bought them a billion dollars of volume. But the timeline doesn't support it. That $125 million opening week landed a full month before Sydney Sweeney showed up. Something else was already working.
The volume trail
Novig didn't come out of nowhere. It raised a $75 million Series B in February at a $500 million valuation, led by Pantera Capital with Multicoin Capital and Forerunner Ventures. Fortinsky and Kelechi Ukah started it in 2021, during Fortinsky's senior year at Harvard, and took it through Y Combinator in 2022.
In August they completed the move from a sweepstakes product to a CFTC-designated contract market and went live across the country, New York included.
The volume since:
Week one averaged about $17.9 million a day. The week ending August 23 averaged $23.3 million, with a $26.3 million single-day peak inside the first week. Back the math out of this morning's number and the weeks since opening week have run near $25 million a day. That's growth through the deadest month on the American sports calendar, right before football turns the faucet on.
Fortinsky told Casino.org in August what was coming next:
"Our growth will continue to be product-led, but we're going to become much more aggressive on user acquisition and brand awareness. I'd be surprised if, in the next two months, any sports fan didn't know who Novig was."
He wasn't exaggerating.
Then Sydney Sweeney showed up
On September 9, Novig ran a national campaign starring Sweeney, photographed nude with sports equipment covering her, built around a single positioning line Fortinsky posted himself: "No wars. No death. No politics. Just sports."
It is a deliberately provocative piece of creative and it got the response you'd expect. British sprinter Amy Hunt pushed back that what women in sport actually look like is "muscles, hard work, sweat, blood, (and) tears." Female Olympians piled on. Two Northeastern professors called it a reinforcement of gender stereotypes, and one of them, Stephen Warren, read the whole thing as "an instigating troll sort of thing." Sweeney answered on Instagram by comparing it to ESPN's Body Issue.
You can hold whatever opinion you want about the creative. The attention numbers aren't in dispute.
Clayton Durant of CAD Management measured Novig's weekly brand mentions going from 392 to 4,633 after the ad dropped, a jump of roughly 1,180%. The spot did 24.5 million views on Instagram and another 433,000 on YouTube.
Two details matter more than the outrage cycle. First, Sweeney isn't a hired face. She approached Novig about an equity partnership and ended up on the cap table, which is why Fortinsky described the campaign as "a very concentrated bet" rather than a bidding war they won. Second, his read on what he bought: "Sydney is great at captivating audiences and being the center of attention. In some sense, it forces us into the national discourse."
For a six-week-old prediction market fighting for the attention of sports fans, forced entry into the national discourse is the product.
Why the taker side is the whole story
NoVig has a unique value prop for casual users: minimal or no vig on taking markets.
Consider a coin-flip game priced -110 on both sides. Each side implies a 52.38% chance. Add them up and you get 104.76%. That extra 4.76% never shows up as a fee line on your receipt. It's baked into the price, which means you need to hit 52.38% of your plays just to finish even. Hit 51% for a full season, which is good work, and you still lose money.
Now run the same position on a peer-to-peer market. You're matched against another trader at a price the two of you agreed on, not a price set to protect somebody else's margin. Novig's model charges retail traders no commission on the trade at all and takes its revenue from institutional participants instead. Fortinsky's framing from the Series B: "We started the company because we felt sports betting was broken."
Do the math on a hundred plays at $100 each. At -110 you're risking $11,000 to win $10,000, and 52.38% is your break-even line. On a two-sided market at a fair price with no commission on the fill, break-even is 50%. That 2.38 points is the entire fight.
Why does the taker side specifically matter? Because recreational players are almost always takers. They see a game, they want a side, they hit the price that's sitting there. They are not posting orders and waiting for a fill. The taker is usually the one carrying the cost, which is exactly the person a no-commission model helps most.
Who are the target users?
The recreational NFL player. You're not running a model. You want a side on the late window and you want the price to be honest. This is the reader the no-commission taker model is built for, and the one the vig has been quietly taxing for years.
The player coming over from a sportsbook. You already have a history of picks. You have never seen it priced against a fair market. That number is usually the most persuasive thing anybody will ever show you about prediction markets, and you can generate it yourself in about a minute (below).
The person who just wants sports. Novig is sports-only. No politics, no war contracts, no crypto tickers. For a large chunk of the audience that's a feature, and the ad was built to say exactly that.
See how much money you could have made / saved
We built the NoVig Calculator on PredictQ for exactly this. Upload your export from Pikkit, Action Network, OddsJam or Novig, and it prices your history against the real market with the book's margin stripped out, then shows you what that margin actually cost you.
It's an audit of your previous bets and a direct view of how much more money would be in your pocket had you been using NoVig.
If you want to see live pricing across venues side by side first, you'll soon be able to find that in our Sports page.
The current Novig offer
Novig's welcome offer right now is deposit $10, get $25 in trade credits with code PREDICTQ.
Novig promo code PREDICTQ: deposit $10, get $25 in trade credits →
The bottom line
A billion dollars this fast is extremely impressive and while the Sydney Sweeney ad campaign played a role, it's likely more the result of a strong sustainable business being built. And for recreational traders, the offer is very appealing.
What we don't know yet is the part that decides whether this lasts. Does the Sweeney spike convert into accounts that are still trading in week six, or does it decay into a mention count? Does a sports-only book hold depth on the long tail once football pulls everybody into four hours of Sunday? And what happens to a no-commission model when the institutional side is carrying the revenue and retail volume grows faster than institutional volume does?
We'll be tracking all three. If you're already trading on Novig and seeing something in the order book we're not, come tell us in the Discord. That's the kind of thing a leaderboard eventually settles, and we'd rather hear it from you first.
This article covers trading activity, volume and marketing news around Novig's prediction market. It is not a directional prediction, a trade recommendation, or investment advice. Prices and odds shown are point-in-time and may change. PredictQ is a marketing partner of Novig and may receive compensation for referrals.