Luana Lopes Lara Becomes World’s Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire at 29

Photo Credits: Luana Lopes Lara / Instagram

Luana Lopes Lara, a 29-year-old former Ballerina and the current co-founder of the prediction market platform Kalshi, has taken the title of the world's youngest self-made female billionaire after a $1 billion funding round valued the company at $11 billion.

Her 12% stake in the firm places her net worth at $1.3 billion, surpassing the previous holders of the record, including 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo and the most famous singer, Taylor Swift.

The investment, led by crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm and joined by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others, marks the third major funding for Kalshi in under six months, after the company raised $185 million at a $2 billion valuation in June and $300 million at $5 billion in October. 

Born in Brazil, Lopes Lara trained at the Bolshoi Theater School, where she faced rigorous ballet routines, and she performed professionally in Austria for nine months after high school before enrolling in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At MIT, she met her co-founder, Tarek Mansour, and the pair developed the idea for Kalshi in 2018 during walks in New York City after internships at Five Rings Capital.

The platform lets users trade contracts on outcomes of events like elections, sports games, interest rate changes, and pop culture developments, operating as a regulated designated contract market approved by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in November 2020. 

Kalshi users placed over $500 million in bets on the 2024 U.S. presidential election, accurately forecasting Donald Trump's win over Kamala Harris, in the first legal election contracts offered in the country in more than a century.

Trading volume on the platform has increased 1000% year-over-year, topping $1 billion weekly, with sports bets driving more than 90% of activity.

The company has formed partnerships with brokerages such as Robinhood and Webull, as well as the National Hockey League, StockX, and Google Finance, and it launched markets on the Solana blockchain in December. 

"Right out of college, we were taking on an insane amount of risk. It was two years without a single product — nothing launched — and if we didn’t get regulated, the company would just go to zero," Lopes Lara said. 

Before securing CFTC approval, the founders contacted over 40 law firms for help, but most declined due to their youth and the startup's small size, until former CFTC official Jeff Bandman assisted them.

In late 2023, when regulators rejected election contracts, Lopes Lara pushed to sue the CFTC against investor advice, and a U.S. District Court ruled in Kalshi's favor in September 2024. 

"We really wanted to do things the right way because our vision was to build the biggest financial exchange in the world. Doing it legally was something we couldn’t compromise on," she said.

During her MIT years, Lopes Lara spent summers as a software engineer at Bridgewater Associates and as a quantitative trader at Citadel Securities, building on her early achievements like a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.

Kalshi, which started in Y Combinator in 2019, now ranks above competitor Polymarket, valued at $9 billion, and has drawn investments from Charles Schwab.

Some states have filed lawsuits against Kalshi's sports contracts, claiming they fall under gambling regulations.