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.
Luana Lopes Lara graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science, spent college summers working for Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel and built an $11 billion startup in just six years. Yet the Brazilian native still calls high school the “most intense years of her life.” Her ballet teachers at Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil held lit cigarettes under her thigh while she extended a leg to her ear—it was a test to see how long she could keep that leg up without getting burned. Fellow dancers would hide glass shards in each other’s shoes to get ahead, and the cutthroat program required her to take academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon and ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.
The rigor and intensity of ballet training was just a small part of her grander ambitions: wanting to become the next Steve Jobs. In part inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, Lopes Lara would study well into the night for academic competitions, winning gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad. For nine months following high school graduation (in December), she performed as a professional ballerina in Austria before hanging up her pointe shoes to begin her next journey in America.
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Now, at age 29, Lopes Lara has just become the youngest self-made woman billionaire on Earth, unseating 31-year-old Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo who took the title from Taylor Swift in April. She and her cofounder, Tarek Mansour, also 29, both moved into the three comma club after their prediction market firm raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. Crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm led the round, announced Tuesday, which also included investors Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator among others.
The company—which allows users to bet on the outcome of future events such as elections, sports games and pop culture happenings—was worth $5 billion after raising $300 million in October and $2 billion after raising $185 million in June. Kalshi’s valuation has soared more than fivefold in less than six months, boosting the net worths of the young cofounders, who each own an estimated 12% of the company, to $1.3 billion each.
“There’s a lot of other people wanting a piece of this business now that Kalshi has shown how big it is,” says Ali Partovi, CEO of venture fund Neo, which was a seed investor in the firm. Since July, notional trading volume on Kalshi has jumped eightfold, reaching $5.8 billion in November, according to the company. Trades on its chief competitor Polymarket, whose own valuation has shot up to $9 billion, have more than tripled since July to $4.3 billion, according to Dune Analytics.
Lopes Lara and Mansour, who grew up in Lebanon, met at MIT where they were part of the same friend group of international students and took similar classes, both majoring in computer science. Mansour, who lived through the 2007 Lebanon conflict and taught himself English while studying for the SATs, remembers how Lopes Lara would always sit in the front row at lectures. The two became close after he began sitting next to her in class to learn from her and became even closer after both landing 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 Forbes. Traders and investors would factor in external events—such as the result of an election or the likelihood of a natural disaster—into their investment decisions, she added.
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.
