Ballerina, MIT ‘math nerd’ and tech founder: Luana Lopes Lara’s journey to become world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire

Kalshi, which lets users globally trade binary contracts on anything from political and economic results to sports and entertainment outcomes, is one of the largest firms of its kind.

Founded by Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour, both 29, the platform recently announced it had raised $1 billion in a financing round that valued it at $11 billion. That valuation lifted both co-founders into the billionaire ranks, with each holding a 12% stake worth about $1.3 billion.

Luana Lopes Lara (L) and Tarek Mansour, the founders of Kalshi. Photo from the company's website

For Lopes Lara, that also means she has dethroned Scale AI’s co-founder Lucy Guo, 31, who had previously held the title since April after taking it from singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.

Though now recognized as a tech founder, Lopes Lara, born in Brazil, had grown as a ballerina. She went to the famed Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil, where she went through what she has described as the "most intense years of her life."

Her cutthroat high school experience, as she recounted to Forbes, included her teachers testing her endurance with lit cigarettes held under her leg, classmates hiding glass in each other’s shoes to get ahead, and a daily curriculum of academics and ballet classes that spanned from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, she also spent late nights preparing for academic contests, earning a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.

After graduating, she danced professionally in Austria for nine months before setting ballet aside to pursue bigger dreams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S.

Luana Lopes Lara as a ballerina. Photo from Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil's Instagram/@escola_bolshoi

There, she crossed paths with Mansour. They moved in the same circle of international students and found themselves in similar classes before both graduating with a degree in computer science and mathematics.

"It was a hard transition. Everyone was better at math than I was, but I generally like being out of my comfort zone, and in some ways I get more relaxed since expectations were lower and I could just focus on learning a lot," Lopes Lara recounted her start at MIT to InGame, a site that covers the regulated sports betting industry in the U.S.

"I got very into finance at the start of college when I realized I liked the math side of CS more than pure coding; from there, finance just made sense."

Their major would later earn them the nickname "MIT math nerds," as called by Bloomberg, though Lopes Lara has joked on social media that she would have preferred "math connoisseur."

The pair secured internships in the financial world of New York City, where the concept for a prediction-market platform first took shape during a late walk back to their apartments.

They realized that many financial decisions hinged on predictions about future events, yet there was no simple way for people to trade directly on those outcomes, according to the company’s website.

After spending their early careers at several financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, Citadel and Bridgewater, they decided to build the solution themselves and launched Kalshi in 2018. Lopes Lara oversees the firm’s internal operations while Mansour handles its external and public-facing duties.

Lopes Lara describes the journey up to that point as "pretty organic."

"There was never a point where we were like, ‘All right, you would be a great co-founder.’" she said in an interview earlier this year. "The idea of Kalshi organically evolved over three years, and then it just was inevitable that we wanted to try to do this and we should do this together."

The duo applied to the startup accelerator Y Combinator with Kalshi and were accepted in 2019. However, they quickly found themselves facing steep obstacles due to the legal uncertainty surrounding prediction markets.

Realizing they needed federal approval to operate, they reached out to more than 40 law firms but were rejected at every turn because of their young age and Kalshi’s small size, as recalled by Michael Seibel, partner emeritus at Y Combinator.

Lopes Lara said the business was an "insane amount of risk" to take when they had just graduated from college.

"If we didn't get regulated, the company would just go to zero," she said.

Both Mansour and Lopes Lara have maintained that Kalshi is distinct from casinos or sports betting platforms as they do not bet against customers; instead, the company serves purely as an exchange, matching traders with opposing views and charging a small fee per trade.

They eventually found a lawyer to help them through the process of applying for federal approval, which was granted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2020.

Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of Kalshi. Photo from Luana Lopes Lara's LinkedIn

One of the firm’s biggest wins since then came last year when it won a legal challenge against the same regulator to gain the ability to list contracts on election outcomes, which was previously blocked, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The ruling landed just ahead of the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, triggering a spike in trading activity on the platform.

It was Lopes Lara who started the push to take the commission to court.

"I had a lot of faith that if we're right on the law, of course the judicial system is going to agree with us," she said of the lawsuit in an interview last month with Citadel, where both she and Mansour once interned. Nonetheless she said it was still a "hard decision."

Trading volume on the platform peaked during the election and later dropped off, but has jumped eightfold since July to reach $5.8 billion in November, according to the company.

When asked about her favorite prediction markets, Loes Lara pointed to the election market, but also shared that she was a big fan of One Direction, the English-Irish boy band.

"So it's whether they're going to have a reunion was like a dear market to me," she said.

She also shared that she and Mansour initially wondered if only big funds would profit, but the platform quickly proved otherwise. One example was a man from Kansas with no trading experience who became its top inflation trader, alongside others betting on everything from movie ratings to music.

These people, she noted, not only earned money for the first time from their shared interests but also built communities around said topics.

"It's very exciting to (...) hear from them, (about) which markets they want us to list," she said.

Asked if the pair have learned from the users, Lopes Lara said: "I think we've learned a lot.

"One of the most interesting things, I think, is (...) there's a lot of people that you wouldn't imagine, like, what their background is, and they're able to become very, very big experts in something."