Luana Lopes Lara, a 29-year-old former ballerina and MIT alumna, has reached a remarkable milestone, becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. In just six years, she helped build Kalshi — a prediction market company she co-founded — into an $11 billion powerhouse.
Lopes Lara, originally from Brazil, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science. During her summers, she gained experience working with some of the world’s most influential financial firms, including Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel.
Her breakthrough came in 2017 when she teamed up with fellow MIT graduate Tarek Mansour to launch Kalshi. The platform allows users to bet on outcomes of future events ranging from elections to sporting contests, and it has swiftly grown into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.
Kalshi’s latest funding round — led by crypto-focused Paradigm and supported by major investors such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator — boosted the company’s valuation to $11 billion. The firm has been praised for transforming financial markets by creating a completely new asset class. As Mansour put it: “We literally are creating an entire new asset class, a completely new financial product.”
The company’s rise has been rapid and dramatic. Kalshi’s valuation jumped from $2 billion in June to $5 billion in October, before reaching its current $11 billion mark. With each co-founder holding an estimated 12% stake, both Lopes Lara and Mansour have officially joined the ranks of billionaires. Early investor Ali Partovi noted, “There’s a lot of other people wanting a piece of this business now that Kalshi has shown how big it is.”
Their journey, however, was far from easy. Early in the company’s development, Kalshi faced major legal questions surrounding the legitimacy of prediction markets. Lopes Lara and Mansour spent years fighting for federal approval — a battle they eventually won when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) authorized their operations in November 2020.
In 2024, Kalshi made history again by offering the first legal U.S. election contracts in more than 100 years. The platform has since surged in popularity, with users placing over $500 million in bets on the 2024 U.S. presidential election alone.
Lopes Lara’s ascent from ballet studios to billion-dollar boardrooms marks one of the most compelling entrepreneurial stories of the decade.