From Ballet Dancer to the World's Youngest Female Billionaire: How She Built the $100 Billion Empire of Kalshi
Original Title: How Kalshi's Cofounder Went From Professional Ballerina To World's Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire
Original Author: Alicia Park, Forbes
Original Translation: Bitpush News
Kalshi is currently valued at $11 billion, making its two co-founders (Luana Lopes Lara, Tarek Mansour) both billionaires, with Luana Lopes Lara becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire as a result.
Luana graduated from MIT with a degree in computer science.
During college, her summer internships included working at Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin's Citadel Investment Group. In just six years, she built a startup valued at $11 billion.
However, this Brazilian entrepreneur still refers to her high school years as "the most stressful time of her life": at the Balé Jovem do Teatro Escola in Brazil, her ballet teacher once placed a lit cigarette under her thigh while she stretched her leg to her ear—this was to test how long she could hold the position without being burned.
Luana attended the Balé Jovem do Teatro Escola in Brazil and performed in a professional dance production of "Swan Lake" at the Salzburg State Theater in Austria in 2014.
To gain an edge in competitions, dancers would hide glass shards in each other's pointe shoes. In addition to this, the grueling training regimen involved Luana studying academic subjects from 7 AM to noon, followed by ballet training from 1 PM to 9 PM.
The rigor and intensity of ballet training were just a small part of her grander ambitions: she aspired to be the next Steve Jobs.
Partially inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, Luana studied for academic competitions late into the night, winning a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.
During the nine months following her high school graduation (in December of that year), she performed as a professional ballet dancer in Austria, then hung up her ballet shoes to embark on her next journey in the United States.
Today, 29-year-old Luana has just become the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet, surpassing 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, who took the title from Taylor Swift in April.
She, along with fellow 29-year-old co-founder Tarek Mansour, entered the "Three Comma Club" (meaning a net worth exceeding one billion dollars) after their prediction market company raised $1 billion at a $11 billion valuation.
The round was led by the crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm, announced on Tuesday, with other investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator.
The company, which allows users to bet on the outcomes of future events such as elections, sports events, and pop culture events, reached a $5 billion valuation after a $3 billion funding round in October last year, and a $20 billion valuation after a $185 million funding round in June last year. In less than six months, Kalshi's valuation has more than quintupled, elevating the net worth of the two young co-founders (each estimated to own about 12% of the company) to $1.3 billion each.
Luana Lopez Lara (left) and Tarek Mansour (right) founded Kalshi in 2018.
"Now that Kalshi has shown how big this market is, there are a lot of other people who want a piece of it," said Ali Partovi, CEO of venture fund Neo, an early investor in the company.
According to the company, Kalshi's nominal trading volume has grown eightfold since July, reaching $58 billion in November.
Meanwhile, according to Dune Analytics data, its main competitor Polymarket's trading volume has more than doubled since July, reaching $43 billion, and its valuation has also soared to $9 billion.
Luana, who grew up in Lebanon, and Mansoor, met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They were both part of the same international student circle, studying similar courses with a focus on computer science.
Mansoor, who had experienced the 2007 Lebanon conflict and self-taught English while preparing for the SAT exam, remembers Luana always sitting in the front row during classes. After Mansoor started sitting next to her to learn from her, the two became acquainted and grew closer after both securing internships at Five Rings Capital in New York City in 2018.
One evening, as they walked back to their intern apartment in the financial district, the idea for a prediction market business became clear.
“We saw that most trades happen when people have some view of the future and then try to find a way to put it into the market,” Luana previously told Forbes. She added that traders and investors incorporate external events—such as election outcomes or the possibility of a natural disaster—into their investment decisions.
Based on the belief that “there should be a way to directly trade the probability of events happening, rather than indirectly through traditional financial markets,” they applied to the Y Combinator startup accelerator and were accepted in 2019.
However, the legitimacy of prediction markets was still unclear, and the co-founders soon faced a tough battle. Michael Seibel, a Y Combinator partner, recalls the early days of working with the duo: when they realized they needed federal approval to legally operate a prediction market, they reached out to over 40 law firms for help but none were willing to assist because the founders were too young and the company was too small.
“Just out of college, we took a huge risk. Two full years with no product—nothing released at all—if we didn’t get regulatory approval, it was game over for the company,” recalled Lopez LaLanne. During the pandemic, she attempted to set up operations in London while Mansoor returned to Beirut. (He experienced the deadly port explosion that claimed over 200 lives in the city and spent his nights working on Kalshi and days helping clean up the community and search for survivors.)
It ultimately took just one lawyer to say “yes” to them: Jeff Bandman, who had worked at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, helped the founders complete the federal approval process and mediated with regulators when objections were raised. In November 2020, Kalshi received approval from the CFTC, becoming a designated contract market, classifying its prediction market as a derivative known as an “event contract.”
This approval also set them apart in the competitive landscape. The blockchain-based Polymarket was not federally regulated at the time and was fined $1.4 million by the CFTC in 2022 for operating an unregistered market.
All of this gave Kalshi a time advantage. (Polymarket was approved to launch in the U.S. in September of last year. Its founder, Shane Coplan, at 27, following a recent $2 billion investment in the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, has become one of the youngest billionaires.)
However, the regulatory struggles did not end there. By the end of 2023, when regulatory authorities rejected Kalshi's election contract set to launch before the 2024 U.S. presidential election on the grounds of "election contract-like gambling," it was Luana who suggested suing the CFTC. "All the rest of the company's investors said it was a terrible idea," Patovi recalled. But the two went ahead with it.
In September 2024, a U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of Kalshi, making the company the first regulated election contract market in the U.S. in over a century, making history.
"We always really wanted to do things the right way because our vision is to build the world’s largest financial exchange and trading platform," Luana said. "Operating legally is something we simply can't compromise on."
Leading up to the election, Kalshi's user base doubled, with over $500 million wagered by users on Trump or Kamala Harris. Its users correctly predicted Trump's presidential victory a month before election night. (Polymarket users wagered a total of $3.6 billion on the presidential election.)
"There are few better training grounds than being a professional ballet dancer to learn to keep going when you're told 'no'—where one misstep or brief pause could mean losing your place," said a16z partner Alex Immerman. "Luana learned that graceful persistence early on... and she brought that calm confidence into the founding of Kalshi."
While some initially doubted its momentum post-U.S. presidential election, Kalshi now says its weekly trading volume exceeds $1 billion, with over 90% of the volume being driven by sports event contracts. In January of this year, Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi's advisory board. (Donald Trump Jr. also joined the advisory board of its competitor Polymarket in September of last year.)
Kalshi has now integrated with brokers such as Robinhood and Webull, and has even brought in hedge fund Susquehanna International Group to add liquidity to its markets. Recently, Kalshi has partnered with companies ranging from the National Hockey League to online marketplace StockX, and has made a big push into the crypto space through integration with the Solana blockchain platform.
The company stated that the new funding will be used to expand integrations with brokers and establish new partnerships with news organizations.
However, it still faces regulatory pressure from some states that have taken legal action against Kalshi's sports contracts, arguing that these contracts should be regulated and taxed at the state level. But considering the company has successfully navigated regulatory hurdles that once seemed insurmountable, Kalshi's investors remain optimistic about the founder's ability to overcome challenges.
For Seibel, who has invested in thousands of companies throughout his career as a Y Combinator partner, this moment is just the beginning: "In my estimation, we've never invested in a company that can make such a huge potential impact on the world."
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