Polymarket hires Goldman Sachs veteran Lisa Mantil for institutional push

Polymarket has appointed Lisa Mantil, a former Goldman Sachs partner, as head of institutional growth, giving her responsibility for building the products, infrastructure and liquidity intended to bring institutions into prediction markets at scale.

Mantil will work with investment managers, trading firms, corporates and banks. Polymarket said the role is aimed at enabling institutional participation across markets that cover politics, economics, science, technology, sports, culture and other real-world events.

She joined after nearly three decades at Goldman Sachs, where she became a partner in 2018. Most recently, she led Goldman Sachs’ ETF Accelerator, an internal platform that helped clients launch investment products.

Mantil said she saw the job as an opportunity to help shape an asset class at an inflection point, drawing on her experience helping institutions adopt products and enter new markets. The company argues that prediction markets can offer institutions a direct way to price and hedge real-world events, rather than relying on correlated assets that may not move in line with the risk being hedged.

The appointment forms part of Polymarket’s expansion after the official May launch of its U.S. exchange. Polymarket US operates as a Commodity Futures Trading Commission-regulated designated contract market under the Commodity Exchange Act; the CFTC designated QCX LLC, doing business as Polymarket US, as a contract market in July 2025.

As reported in August, Polymarket had also hired Travis VanderZanden as chief growth officer while reshaping its marketing and growth operations ahead of a busier autumn trading period. Earlier this month, the company named Warren Jenson, formerly chief financial officer at Amazon, Electronic Arts, Delta Air Lines and NBC, as its CFO.

The push comes as prediction-market trading volumes have risen over the past year, largely on retail interest in sports-related contracts, while exchanges seek deeper institutional liquidity. Institutional adoption remains early, however, with some prospective participants holding back amid disputes between platforms and states over oversight of sports-related event contracts.

Block trades have become an early test of that institutional effort. Kalshi completed the first such exchange trade in April, according to CNBC. Polymarket completed its first block trade on June 2, a six-figure transaction between digital-asset brokerage FalconX and trading-technology startup Anera Labs involving a contract tied to an index of Nvidia H100 GPU rental prices.

Polymarket’s international exchange is separate from its U.S. platform, is not regulated in the United States and runs on the Polygon blockchain. Brokers told CNBC that Polymarket had discussed completing block trades on its U.S. exchange and was nearing the ability to do so.

Polymarket founder and chief executive Shayne Coplan said Mantil’s institutional experience and relationships made her the right person to lead the company’s latest business expansion.