In a world where career paths often move in predictable lines, Luana Lopes Lara’s journey stands out as something almost cinematic. At just 29, she has become the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, thanks to the extraordinary rise of her prediction-market startup, Kalshi.
Lara has now taken the crown from Scale AI’s Lucy Guo who had only recently overtaken Taylor Swift on the same list. The shift reflects the whirlwind growth of an industry few people saw coming.
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A Startup That Shocked Wall Street and Silicon Valley
Kalshi’s latest funding round has rewritten record books. According to Forbes, the company raised $1 billion in a fresh round led by the crypto-focused venture firm Paradigm, with major participation from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator.
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The deal values Kalshi at $11 billion, pushing both co-founders Lara and her MIT classmate Tarek Mansour into the billionaire category. Each now holds an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion.
What makes this rise so dramatic is the pace. Kalshi stood at a valuation of $2 billion in June, $5 billion in October, and now more than double that. Its notional trading volume has also exploded, jumping eightfold since July to reach $5.8 billion in November.
Even its nearest rival, Polymarket now valued at $9 billion has seen its volumes triple in the same period. The two platforms are reshaping how people interact with real-world events.
What Is Kalshi?
Kalshi is a regulated prediction-market platform where users trade on outcomes of future events elections, sports games, cultural moments, and more. The concept is simple: people buy and sell contracts tied to questions about the future.
But getting regulated was the hard part.
Founded in 2019, Kalshi became the first federally regulated prediction market after securing CFTC approval in 2020. That approval set it apart from unregulated competitors, but also put the company under intense scrutiny.
In 2023, regulators blocked Kalshi’s election contracts, leading to a long legal fight. Many investors believed the case was impossible to win. But Lara pushed forward, insisting on challenging the ruling. Her bet paid off.
In September 2024, a federal judge ruled in favour of Kalshi, clearing the way for the first regulated U.S. election contracts in more than 100 years. Ahead of the presidential vote, users traded more than $500 million, and Kalshi’s markets correctly predicted the result weeks before election night.
Today, more than 90% of its weekly trading volume over $1 billion comes from sports contracts.
The company is also expanding fast, integrating with Robinhood and Webull, onboarding Susquehanna International Group for liquidity, and signing partnerships with the NHL, StockX, and Solana.
Kalshi says the new funds will help accelerate deals with brokerages and news organisations, making prediction markets a mainstream financial tool.
Who Is Luana Lopes Lara?
Lara’s life before Kalshi feels like another chapter from another book. Born in Brazil, she trained at the prestigious Bolshoi Theatre School, enduring a level of competition that she now says was “more intense than MIT.” She later became a professional ballerina in Austria, performing with discipline and precision that would one day serve her well in the startup world.
But academia also came naturally to her. She excelled in school, won national Olympiad medals, and eventually moved to the U.S. to study computer science at MIT.
It was there that she met her future co-founder, Tarek Mansour.
How the Idea Was Born
The two grew close when Mansour began sitting next to her in class, trying to learn from her. Their friendship strengthened when both landed internships at Five Rings Capital in New York in 2018.
During their late-night walks back to their intern apartments in the Financial District, they began discussing the idea of a platform where people could trade on the outcome of real events.
Those informal conversations turned into brainstorming sessions — and eventually into the blueprint for Kalshi.
Today, that idea has turned Lara into the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, and prediction markets into one of the most closely watched areas in global finance.