From ballerina to the youngest billionaire: How she built the Kalshi hundred billion empire.

Source: Forbes

Author: Alicia Park

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

Kalshi is currently valued at $11 billion, making its two co-founders (Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour) billionaires, with Luana Lopes Lara also becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.

Luana graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in Computer Science.

During her university years, her summer internship experiences 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 dollars.

However, this Brazilian entrepreneur still refers to her high school years as “the most stressful times in her life”: at the Teatro Bolshoi school in Brazil, the ballet teacher once placed a lit cigarette under her thigh while she stretched her leg up to her ear—this was to test how long she could maintain that position without getting burned.

Luana studied at the Teatro Bolshoi in Brazil and went to the Salzburg State Theater in Austria in 2014 for a professional dance performance of “Swan Lake.”

In order to gain an advantage in the competition, the dancers hide glass shards in each other's ballet shoes. In addition to this, the brutal training program includes cultural studies from 7 AM to noon and ballet training from 1 PM to 9 PM.

The rigor and intensity of ballet training is just a small part of her grander ambitions: she wants to be the next Steve Jobs.

Partly inspired by her mother, a math teacher, and her father, an electrical engineer, Luana studied late into the night for academic competitions, winning a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.

In the nine months after graduating from high school (after graduating in December of that year), she performed as a professional ballet dancer in Austria, then took off her ballet shoes and began her next journey in the United States.

At 29 years old, Luana has just become the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world, replacing 31-year-old Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, who held the title after taking it from Taylor Swift in April.

She and her co-founder Tarek Mansour, who is also 29 years old, both entered the “three comma club” (meaning a net worth of over one billion dollars) after raising one billion dollars at a valuation of 11 billion dollars for their prediction market company.

The venture capital firm Paradigm, focused on the cryptocurrency sector, led this round of financing, which was announced on Tuesday, with other investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator.

The company that allows users to bet on the outcomes of future events (such as elections, sports events, and pop culture events) saw its valuation reach $5 billion after raising $300 million in financing last October, up from $2 billion after raising $185 million in June. In less than six months, Kalshi's valuation skyrocketed more than fivefold, increasing the net worth of its two young co-founders (each estimated to hold about 12% of the company) to $1.3 billion.

Luanna Lopez Lara (left) and Tarek Mansour (right) founded Kalshi in 2018.

“Since Kalshi has already shown how big this market is, many others now want to get a piece of the pie,” said Ali Patowary, CEO of venture fund Neo, which is a seed round investor in the company.

According to the company, Kalshi's notional trading volume has increased eightfold since July, reaching $5.8 billion in November.

According to data from Dune Analytics, its main competitor Polymarket has seen its trading volume more than double since July, reaching $4.3 billion, and its own valuation has soared to $9 billion.

Luana, who grew up in Lebanon, and Mansour met at MIT. They are members of the same international student circle, studying similar courses and both majoring in computer science.

Mansour, who experienced the 2007 Lebanon conflict and self-taught English while preparing for the SAT exam, remembers that Luana always sat in the front row during class. After Mansour started sitting next to her to learn from her, the two became familiar with each other and became even closer after both secured internship opportunities at Five Rings Capital in New York City in 2018.

One evening, on their way back to the intern apartment in the financial district, the idea of prediction market business became clear.

“We see that most trades occur when people have some view of the future and then try to find a way to put that into the market,” Luana previously told Forbes. She added that traders and investors incorporate external events—such as the outcome of elections or the likelihood of natural disasters—into their investment decisions.

Based on the belief that “there should be a way to directly trade the probability of an event occurring, rather than indirectly trading through traditional financial markets,” they applied to the startup accelerator Y Combinator and were accepted in 2019.

However, the legality of prediction markets remains unclear, and the co-founders soon faced a tough battle. Y Combinator's honorary partner, Michael Seibel, recalled the early days of working with the two: when they realized they needed federal approval to legally operate prediction markets, they contacted 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 after graduating from college, we took on huge risks. We went two whole years without any products—nothing was released—if we didn’t get regulatory approval, the company would go to zero,” recalled Lopez Lara. During the pandemic, she tried to establish a business in London, while Mansour returned home to Beirut. (He experienced the deadly port explosion that killed over 200 people in the city, spending nights working on Kalshi and helping to clean up the community and search for survivors during the day.)

Ultimately, all it took was one lawyer to say “yes”: Jeff Bandman, who previously worked at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, helped the founders complete the federally approved application and assisted them in negotiations when regulators raised objections. In November 2020, Kalshi received approval from the CFTC to become a designated contract market, classifying its prediction market as a derivative known as “event contracts.”

This approval also allowed them to stand out in the competitive landscape. The blockchain-based Polymarket was not under federal regulation 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. last September. Its founder, Shane Copland, is 27 years old and has become one of the youngest billionaires thanks to a recent $2 billion investment from the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.)

However, the regulatory struggle did not end there. At the end of 2023, when regulators rejected Kalshi's election contracts launched before the 2024 U.S. presidential election on the grounds that “election contracts are similar to gambling,” it was Luana who suggested suing the CFTC. “All the other investors in the company said it would be a bad idea,” Patovi recalled. But the two of them went ahead and did it anyway.

In September 2024, a U.S. district court judge made a favorable ruling for Kalshi, which became the first regulated election contract market in the U.S. in over a century, making history.

“We really hope to do things the right way because our vision is to create the largest financial exchange in the world,” Luana said. “Operating legally is something we cannot compromise on.”

In the preparation phase before the election, the number of users on Kalshi doubled, with over $500 million wagered on Trump or Kamala Harris. Its users correctly predicted President Trump's victory a month before election night. (Polymarket users' total bets on the presidential election amounted to $3.6 billion.)

“There are few trainings better than that of a professional ballet dancer, which can teach you to keep moving forward even when you're told 'no' — an injury or even a brief break can mean losing your position,” said a16z partner Alex Immerman. “Luana learned to persist gracefully at an early age… and she brought that calm confidence into the founding process of Kalshi.”

Despite initial skepticism about whether it could maintain momentum after the U.S. presidential election, Kalshi has stated that its weekly trading volume now exceeds $1 billion, with over 90% of that volume driven by contracts on sporting events. In January, Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi's advisory board. (Trump Jr. also joined the advisory board of its competitor Polymarket last September.)

Kalshi has now integrated with brokers such as Robinhood and Webull, and has even brought in the hedge fund Susquehanna International Group to add liquidity to its market. Recently, Kalshi has signed partnerships with companies like the National Hockey League and the online marketplace StockX, and has made a significant entry into the cryptocurrency space through integration with the blockchain platform Solana.

The company stated that the new funds will be used to expand integration with brokers and to establish new partnerships with news agencies.

However, it still faces regulatory pressure from some states that have taken legal action against Kalshi's sports contracts, believing that these contracts should be regulated and taxed at the state level. But considering that the company has successfully overcome what once seemed like insurmountable regulatory hurdles, Kalshi's investors remain optimistic about the founder's ability to overcome challenges.

For Seibel (a partner at Y Combinator), who has invested in thousands of companies throughout his career, this moment is just the beginning: “In my understanding, we have never invested in a company that has such a huge potential impact on the world.”