Hi, it’s Alex from 20VC. I’m investing in seed & series A European vertical solutions (vSol) which are industry specific solutions aiming to become industry OS and combining dynamics from SaaS, marketplaces and fintechs. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about venture capital and vSol. Today, I’m super excited to announce our latest investment in XO Market.
20VC is co-leading XO’s $6m seed alongside Picus, with Coinbase Ventures, Ventures Together, Foreword in the round. We’re also bringing 30+ incredible angels to the cap. table including Pat Cummins (captain of the Australian cricket team) and Michele Attisani (cofounder at FACEIT).
I met Ali on a Monday in Feb. 2026 and knew immediately we had to be in business with him. After a short, intense day trip to Zug mid-week, the deal was done by Friday. Ali has a very unique personal story. He was running a family hardware business in Syria when the civil war started in 2011. He had to flee and restart his life from scratch twice. First, in Lebanon, then in Switzerland. Somewhere in that process he discovered crypto. He worked at Roche and Kaskade while building crypto projects on the side, quietly building a reputation for himself in the space. Years of obsession with prediction markets, and years of frustration with Polymarket, led him to one conclusion: rebuild the category from scratch.
Kalshi ($22bn valuation) and Polymarket (raising at $15bn valuation) are currently dominating the category but we believe there is space for other generational businesses. Why? Because both are centralised gatekeepers. Every market is manually approved by curators on Polymarket and by the US regulator on Kalshi. They will only list markets with enough demand to justify the overhead and markets aligned with their curation agenda. The long-tail does not exist on these platforms.
Now, imagine a world in which you can create your own prediction market in seconds. On any topic. Any belief. Any corner of the world. This is XO. When you have conviction on something, you can create your market in seconds without asking anyone’s permission.
Polymarket and Kalshi are the Netflix of prediction markets. XO is the YouTube.
As a result, very unique markets are been created on XO. Here are some of my recent favourite ones:
Will the first baby born in Zug in 2026 have an “X” or “O” in their name?
Will MrBeast “Saved 1,000 Animals” video reach 120m by Nov. 2025?
To get there, the team at XO had to solve three technical challenges:
The liquidity problem: replace the order book with a market maker that holds all outcomes in a single unified pool, adjusts prices dynamically in real time enabling markets to go live with just $500 in seed liquidity.
The resolution problem: decentralised resolution mechanism to avoid oracle manipulations that affected Polymarket combining AI resolution agents and a decentralised jury pool.
The classical web-3 onboarding problem: building an invisible crypto infrastructure accessible with FIAT onramps to be in a position to grow to 1 billion users and not only serving crypto native users.
XO launched publicly in Nov. 2025. In 6 months: 33k users, 930+ markets created, 2.4m transactions, $280m in volume. FIAT onramps went live in Mar. 2026. Parlays launched this week. XO Vaults to democratise access to market making on prediction markets is coming soon.
Team is cooking. Onwards.
Thanks to Julia! 🦒 Thanks for reading! See you soon for another issue! 👋
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