Kalshi Co-founder: From Ballet Dancer to World's Youngest Female Billionaire

Source: Forbes; Compiled by: Jinse Finance

Luana Lopes Lara graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science. During summer breaks from college, she worked at Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin's Citadel Investment Group, building an $11 billion startup in just six years. However, this Brazilian-born girl still describes high school as "the most stressful years of my life." At the Bolshoi Theatre School in Brazil, her ballet teacher would place a lit cigarette under her thigh and make her stretch her leg to her ear—a test of how long she could lift her leg without getting burned.

To get ahead, classmates would hide shards of glass in each other's shoes. The fierce competition also required her to attend academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon and ballet lessons from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. The rigor and intensity of ballet training were only a small part of her grand ambition: she aspired to be the next Steve Jobs. Influenced by her mother, a math teacher, and her father, an electrical engineer, Lopez Lara often stayed up late studying and participating in academic competitions, ultimately winning a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad. After graduating high school (in December), she worked as a professional ballet dancer in Austria for nine months before bidding farewell to ballet shoes and embarking on a new journey in the United States. Lopes Lara, 29, has just become the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, surpassing 31-year-old ScaleAI co-founder Lucy Guo, who took the title from Taylor Swift in April. She and co-founder Tarek Mansour, also 29, raised $1 billion for their prediction market company, Kalshi, valuing it at $11 billion, both joining the billionaire club. The funding round, announced Tuesday, was led by cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm Paradigm, with other investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and Y Combinator. The company, which allows users to bet on the outcomes of future events such as elections, sporting events, and popular culture phenomena, reached a $5 billion valuation after raising $300 million in October and a $2 billion valuation after raising $185 million in June. Kalshi's valuation has surged more than fivefold in less than six months, bringing the net worth of its two young co-founders (each holding approximately 12% of the company) to $1.3 billion. Mansour previously told Forbes, "We're essentially creating a whole new asset class, a whole new financial product. We've legitimized it and created the framework and industry for it." "After Kalshi showed such a massive scale, now a lot of people want a piece of the pie," said Ali Partovi, CEO of venture capital firm Neo, a seed investor in Kalshi. According to the firm, Kalshi's notional trading volume has grown eightfold since July, reaching $5.8 billion in November. According to data from Dune Analytics, its main competitor Polymarket's trading volume has more than tripled since July, reaching $4.3 billion, while Polymarket's valuation has soared to $9 billion. Mansour grew up in Lebanon and later met Lopez Lara at MIT. They were part of the same international student circle and took very similar courses, both majoring in computer science. Mansour experienced the 2007 Lebanon conflict firsthand and taught himself English while preparing for the SAT. He recalled that Lopez Lara always sat in the front row of class. Later, Mansour began sitting next to her in class to learn from her, and the two gradually became close. In 2018, they both interned at Five Rings Capital in New York, further strengthening their relationship. One evening, on their way back to their internship apartments in the financial district, they suddenly had the idea to create a prediction market. “We’ve found that most trading happens when people have expectations about the future and are trying to find ways to translate those expectations into market trades,” Lopez Lara previously told Forbes. She added that traders and investors incorporate external events—such as the probability of election results or natural disasters—into their investment decisions. They firmly believed there should be a way to directly trade the probability of events occurring, rather than indirectly through traditional financial markets, so they applied to the startup accelerator Y Combinator and were accepted in 2019. However, the legality of prediction markets was unclear, and the two co-founders quickly faced numerous difficulties. Michael Seibel, an honorary partner at Y Combinator, recalled his early experience working with the two founders: when they realized they needed federal government approval to legally operate a prediction market, they contacted more than 40 law firms for help, but none were willing to lend a hand because the founders were too young and the company too small. “Right out of university, we took on a huge risk. For two whole years, we had no products—nothing—and if we didn’t get regulatory approval, the company would go bankrupt,” Lopez Lara recalls. During the pandemic, she was in London working to grow the business, while Mansour remained at home in Beirut. (Mansour was in Beirut when the deadly explosion at the port killed more than 200 people; he worked for Kalshi for weeks on end, spending his days cleaning up the community and searching for survivors.) All it took was the approval of one lawyer: Jeff Bandman, who had worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), helped the founders with their federal approval application and defended them when regulators blocked them. In November 2020, Kalshi received CFTC approval to operate as a Designated Contract Market (DCM), its prediction market being classified as a type of derivative called event contracts. This approval also set them apart from the competition. Polymarket, a blockchain-based company, was previously unregulated by the federal government and was fined $1.4 million by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 2022 for operating an unregistered market. All of this gave Kalshi an initial advantage. (Polymarket was approved to launch in the U.S. in September 2025. Its founder, Shayne Coplan, at just 27 years old, is one of the world's youngest billionaires, thanks to a recent $2 billion investment from the New York Stock Exchange's parent company.) However, the regulatory battle didn't end there. In late 2023, regulators rejected Kalshi's election contracts, which were intended to precede the 2024 U.S. presidential election, citing their gambling-like nature. At the time, Lopez Lara considered suing the CFTC. "All the other investors in the company thought it was a terrible idea," Partovi recalled. But the two of them went ahead with it anyway. In September 2024, a U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of Kalshi, making the company the first regulated election trading platform in the United States in over a century, a historic achievement. “We genuinely want to do things the right way because our vision is to build the world’s largest financial trading platform,” said Lopez Lara. “Legal compliance is a principle we will never compromise on.” In the lead-up to the election, Kalshi users placed over $500 million in bets on candidates and accurately predicted President Trump's victory a month before election night. (Polymarket users wagered a total of $3.6 billion in the presidential election.)

Lopez Lara was a professional dancer at the Salzburg State Theatre in Austria, where she participated in a season of Swan Lake.

“There’s no better training for facing ‘no’ and persevering than being a professional ballet dancer—injuries or even short breaks can mean losing your place,” said Alex Immerman, a partner at a16z. “Lopez Lara learned to gracefully persevere early on…and she brought that calm confidence to the creation of Kalshi.” Despite initial skepticism about its ability to maintain growth momentum after the presidential election, Kalshi states that it currently handles over $1 billion in trading volume weekly, with over 90% of that coming from sports contracts. In January, Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi's advisory board. (Trump Jr. also joined the advisory board of its rival Polymarket last September.) Kalshi has already integrated with brokerages such as Robinhood and Webull, and even brought in hedge fund Susquehanna International Group to increase liquidity in its markets. Recently, Kalshi has established partnerships with several companies, including the National Hockey League (NHL) and online trading platform StockX, and is aggressively entering the cryptocurrency space through integration with blockchain platform Solana. The company stated that the newly acquired funds will be used to expand its integrations with brokerages and establish new partnerships with news media. However, Kalshi still faces regulatory pressure from various states, which have filed lawsuits against Kalshi's sports contracts, arguing that these contracts should be regulated and taxed by state governments. But given the company's success in overcoming what once seemed like insurmountable regulatory hurdles, Kalshi's investors remain confident in the founders' enterprising spirit. For Seibel, who has invested in thousands of companies throughout his career, this is just the beginning: "I don't know if we've ever invested in a company with such a huge potential impact on the world as Kalshi."