Prediction market Kalshi’s 29-year-old co-founder dethrones Lucy Guo as world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire

Kalshi, which lets users around the world trade binary contracts on political, sports, economic, and entertainment outcomes, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $1 billion in a financing round that values it at $11 billion. This marks an over fivefold increase from $2 billion in June.

The surge in value has propelled the platform’s young co-founders, Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour, also 29, into the billionaire club. Each owns roughly 12% of the company and an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.

With that, Lopes Lara has become the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire in place of Guo, 31, who earlier claimed the title from singer-songwriter Taylor Swift in April.

Guo built her fortune through tech startups, most notably Scale AI, a data-labeling company she co-founded with Alexandr Wang. Scale also made Wang the world’s youngest self-made billionaire earlier this year, a title he later lost to another prediction market founder, Shayne Coplan of Polymarket.

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

Lopes Lara, a Brazilian native, met Mansour at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were part of the same friend group of international students. They took similar courses and both majored in computer science.

They both later interned at Five Rings Capital in New York City. The idea for a prediction market platform was sparked one night during a walk back to their intern apartments. They founded Kalshi in 2018.

"We saw that most trading happens when people have some view about the future, and then try to find a way to put that in the markets," Lopes Lara recounted.

Prediction markets have recently emerged as one of the hottest trends on both Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, with participants betting that "event contracts" can bypass long-standing rules separating gambling from finance, according to Bloomberg.

"Event contracts may be seen as speculative, but the explosive growth of Kalshi and Polymarket indicates they are more than just betting mediums," Rudy Yang, senior emerging technology analyst at PitchBook, told Reuters.

"Markets are starting to utilize them as genuine tools for managing investment, political, and macroeconomic risks."

The latest financing round follows Kalshi’s successful legal challenge against the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which cleared the way for the startup to list contracts tied to the presidential election. Lopes Lara was the one who proposed suing the commission in late 2023 after Kalshi’s election contracts for the 2024 U.S. presidential race were rejected by regulators.

Kalshi has also experienced rapid growth, with weekly trading volumes now surpassing $1 billion, a more than 1,000% increase from 2024, according to the company.

While it still faces regulatory scrutiny from states pursuing legal action over its sports contracts, investors are confident in Kalshi’s founders, seeing how they have steered the firm to overcome regulatory hurdles that once seemed insurmountable.

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