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Who is Luana Lopes Lara? 29-year-old who went from ballerina to world's youngest self-made woman billionaire
Luana Lopes Lara, a former ballerina, is now the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire. She cofounded Kalshi, a prediction market startup.
Luana Lopes Lara, 29, has become the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire after her prediction-market startup, Kalshi, reached a $11 billion valuation. Lara has taken the title from Scale AI’s Lucy Guo, who herself only recently surpassed Taylor Swift.
According to a Forbes report, Kalshi raised $1 billion in a new round led by crypto-focused VC firm Paradigm, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator. The fundraising pushes both cofounders, Lopes Lara and her MIT classmate Tarek Mansour, also 29, into the billionaire ranks, with each now holding an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion.
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What is Kalshi?
Kalshi’s meteoric rise has stunned the financial and tech worlds. The platform, which allows users to trade on future events ranging from elections and sports to pop culture moments, was valued at $5 billion as recently as October and $2 billion in June. Since July, notional trading volume has jumped eightfold to $5.8 billion in November. Its chief rival, Polymarket, now valued at $9 billion, has also seen volumes triple in the same period.
The explosive growth comes after years of regulatory hurdles. Founded in 2019, Kalshi became the first federally regulated prediction market platform when it secured CFTC approval in 2020, a milestone that set it apart from unregulated competitors. The battle continued in 2023, when regulators blocked Kalshi’s election contracts. Despite investor scepticism, Lopes Lara pushed ahead with suing the CFTC. In September 2024, a federal judge ruled in Kalshi’s favour, allowing the first regulated US election contracts in more than a century. Ahead of the vote, users traded over $500 million on the presidential race, which Kalshi markets correctly predicted a month before election night.
Today, over 90% of Kalshi’s weekly trading volume, which exceeds $1 billion, comes from sports contracts. The company has expanded aggressively, striking integrations with Robinhood and Webull, onboarding hedge fund Susquehanna International Group for liquidity, and launching partnerships with the National Hockey League, StockX and Solana. The company said the new funding will be used to expand its integration with brokerages and strike new partnerships with news outlets.
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Who is Luana Lopes Lara?
Born in Brazil, Lopes Lara trained at the Bolshoi Theatre School, where she endured an ultra-competitive environment she now calls more intense than Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A former professional ballerina in Austria, she excelled academically, winning national Olympiad medals before heading to the US to study computer science at MIT. There, she met Mansour.
The two became close after he began sitting next to her in class to learn from her and became even closer after both landed internships at Five Rings Capital in New York City in 2018. It was on their walks back home to their intern apartments in the Financial District one night that the idea of a prediction market business clicked.
“We saw that most trading happens when people have some view about the future, and then try to find a way to put that in the markets,” Lopes Lara previously told the outlet.
