How Kalshi’s Cofounder Went From Professional Ballerina To World’s Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire

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Kalshi is now worth $11 billion, making both its founders billionaires and Luana Lopes Lara the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire.

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2025/12/02/how-kalshis-luana-lopes-lara-cofounder-went-from-professional-ballerina-to-worlds-youngest-self-made-woman-billionaire/

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00:00Today on Forbes, how Kalshi's co-founder went from professional ballerina to world's youngest

00:06self-made woman billionaire. Luana Lopez Lara graduated from Massachusetts Institute of

00:13Technology with a degree in computer science, spent college summers working for Ray Dalio's

00:19Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin's Citadel, and she built an $11 billion startup in just six

00:26years. Yet the Brazilian native still calls high school the, quote, most intense years of her life.

00:33Her ballet teachers at Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil held lit cigarettes under her thigh while

00:38she extended one leg to her ear. It was a test to see how long she could keep that leg up without

00:43getting burned. Fellow dancers would hide glass shards in each other's shoes to get ahead, and the

00:50cutthroat program required her to take academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon before taking ballet

00:56classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. But her mind was always set on grander ambitions, wanting to become the

01:03next Steve Jobs. In part inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father,

01:10Lopez Lara would study well into the night for academic competitions, winning gold at the Brazilian

01:15Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad. Following high school graduation,

01:21she performed as a professional ballerina in Austria for nine months before hanging up her point shoes

01:27to attend MIT and fulfill her ambitions in America. Now, at age 29, Lopez Lara has just become the

01:36youngest self-made woman billionaire on earth, unseating 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo,

01:43who took the title from Taylor Swift in April. Lopez Lara and her co-founder Tarek Mansour,

01:49also 29 years old, both moved into the Three Comma Club after their prediction market firm Kalshi

01:56raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. Crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm led

02:03the round, announced Tuesday, with participation from investors Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz,

02:10and Y Combinator, among others. The company, which allows users to bet on the outcome of future events

02:17such as elections, sports games, and pop culture happenings, was worth $5 billion after raising $300

02:24million in October and $2 billion after raising $185 million in June. Kalshi's valuation has

02:32quintupled in less than six months, boosting the net worths of the young co-founders, who each own

02:38an estimated 12% of the company, to $1.3 billion each. Ali Partovi, CEO of venture fund NIO, which was

02:47a seed investor in Kalshi, says, quote, There's a lot of other people wanting a piece of this business

02:52now that Kalshi has shown how big it is. Since July, notional trading volume on Kalshi has jumped

03:00eightfold, reaching $5.8 billion in November, according to the company. Notional trades on its

03:07chief competitor, Polymarket, whose own valuation has shot up to $9 billion, have more than tripled

03:13since July, to $4.3 billion in November, according to Dune Analytics. Lopez, Lara, and Mansoor, who grew

03:22up in Lebanon, met at MIT, where they were part of the same friend group of international students

03:27and took similar classes, both majoring in computer science. Mansoor, who lived through the 2007 Lebanon

03:34conflict and taught himself English while studying for the SATs, remembers how Lopez Lara would always

03:40sit in the front row at lectures. The two became close after he began sitting next to her in class

03:45to learn from her and became even closer after both landing internships at Five Rings Capital in New

03:51York City in 2018. It was on their walks back home to their intern apartments in the financial

03:57district one night that the idea of a prediction market business clicked. Lopez Lara previously

04:03told Forbes, quote,

04:04We saw that most trading happens when people have some view about the future and then try to find a

04:09way to put that in the markets. She added that traders would factor in external events, such as the

04:15result of an election or the likelihood of a natural disaster, into their investment decisions.

04:21With the conviction that there should be a way to directly trade on the probability of events

04:25rather than indirectly trading them through traditional financial markets, Lopez Lara and Mansoor applied to

04:32the startup accelerator Y Combinator and got accepted in 2019. But the legality of prediction markets was

04:39unclear, and the co-founders soon faced an uphill battle. For full coverage, check out Alicia Park's piece

04:46on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.

How Kalshi’s Cofounder Went From Professional Ballerina To World’s Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire

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