From ballet dancer and MIT graduate to 29-year-old female billionaire, the founder of Kalshi achieved a remarkable life transformation in just six years.

The original article is from Forbes.

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily Golem ( @web3_golem )

Luana Lopes Lara graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science. During her summer breaks from college, she worked at Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin's Citadel Investment Group, building an $11 billion startup in just six years.

Want to be Steve Jobs' "ballet girl"

However, this Brazilian-American girl still describes high school as "the most stressful years of my life." At the Bolshoi Theatre School in Brazil, her ballet teacher would place a lit cigarette under her thigh and make her stretch her leg to her ear—a test of how long she could hold that position without getting burned. To get ahead, classmates would hide shards of glass in each other's shoes. This brutal competition required her to attend academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon and ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. every day.

Lopes Lara was a professional ballet dancer at the Salzburg State Theatre in Austria, where she participated in a season of Swan Lake.

The rigor and intensity of ballet training were only a small part of her grand ambition: she aspired to be the next Steve Jobs. Influenced by her mother, a math teacher, and her father, an electrical engineer, Lopes Lara often stayed up late studying and participating in academic competitions, ultimately winning a gold medal at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad. After graduating from high school, she worked as a professional ballet dancer in Austria for nine months before bidding farewell to ballet shoes and embarking on a new journey in the United States.

At 29, she became the youngest self-made female billionaire.

Now, 29-year-old Lopes Lara has just become the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, surpassing 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, who took the title from Taylor Swift in April of this year.

On December 2nd, Kalshi, the prediction market company she co-founded with 29-year-old Tarek Mansour, announced it had raised $1 billion in funding, valuing the company at $11 billion and making them both billionaires. The round was led by prominent crypto VC Paradigm, with other investors including Sequoia Capital, a16z, and Y Combinator.

This company, which allows users to bet on the outcomes of future events such as elections, sporting events, and popular culture phenomena, reached a valuation of $5 billion after raising $300 million in October, and then reached a valuation of $2 billion after raising $185 million in June. Kalshi's valuation more than quintupled in less than six months, bringing the net worth of its two young co-founders (each holding approximately 12% of the company's shares) to $1.3 billion.

Luana Lopes Lara (left) and Tarek Mansour (right).

“We are actually creating a completely new asset class, a completely new financial product,” Mansour said. “We have legitimized it and created the framework and industry for it.”

“Kalshi has now demonstrated its massive scale, and many people want a piece of the pie,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of Neo, a venture capital firm that was a seed investor in the company. According to the firm, Kalshi’s notional trading volume has increased eightfold since July, reaching $5.8 billion in November. Its main competitor, Polymarket, has seen its trading volume more than triple since July, reaching $4.3 billion, according to data from Dune Analytics, while Polymarket’s valuation has soared to $9 billion.

In its early days, Kalshi hovered on the brink of survival for two whole years.

Lopes Lara and Mansour both grew up in Lebanon and met at MIT. They belonged to the same international student social circle, took similar courses, and both majored in computer science. Mansour experienced the 2007 Lebanon conflict firsthand and taught himself English while preparing for the SAT. He recalled that Lopes Lara always sat in the front row of class.

The two grew closer after Mansour started sitting next to her and learning from her, and even closer after they both landed internships at Five Rings Capital in New York in 2018. One evening, while walking back to their internship apartment in the Financial District, the idea for a market prediction business suddenly came to them. “We found that most trading happens when people have expectations about the future and are trying to find a way to translate those expectations into market trades,” Lopes Lara said. She added that traders and investors incorporate external events—such as the outcome of an election or the probability of a natural disaster—into their investment decisions.

They firmly believed there should be a way to directly trade the probability of events occurring, rather than indirectly through traditional financial markets, so they applied to the startup accelerator Y Combinator and were accepted in 2019.

However, the legality of prediction markets remained unclear, and the two co-founders soon faced numerous difficulties. Michael Seibel, an honorary partner at Y Combinator, recalled their early experience working with them: "When they realized they needed federal government approval to legally operate a prediction market, they contacted more than 40 law firms for help, but none of them were willing to help because the founders were too young and the company was too small."

“Right after graduating from university, we took on a huge risk. For two whole years, we didn’t have any products. If we didn’t launch any products and if we didn’t get regulatory approval, the company would go bankrupt,” Lopes Lara recalled.

During the pandemic, Lopes Lara was working hard to expand his business in London, while Mansour was at home in Beirut. When the deadly explosion at the Port of Beirut killed more than 200 people, Mansour was in Beirut at the time, spending weeks helping clean up the community and search for survivors during the day and working at the Kalshi Hotel at night.

A battle with regulators, and a victory.

In reality, they only needed one lawyer to succeed. Jeff Bandman, who had worked at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), helped the founders complete their federal approval application and negotiated with regulators when they were blocked. In November 2020, Kalshi received CFTC approval to become a Designated Contract Market (DCM), and its prediction market was classified as a type of derivative called event contracts.

This approval set them apart in a highly competitive market. The blockchain-based Polymarket was not federally regulated and was fined $1.4 million by the CFTC in 2022 for operating an unregistered marketplace. This regulatory advantage gave Kalshi a significant edge during that period. (Note: Polymarket was approved for listing in the US in September. Its founder, Shayne Coplan, at only 27 years old, became one of the youngest billionaires thanks to a recent $2 billion investment from the New York Stock Exchange's parent company.)

However, the regulatory battle didn't end there. In late 2023, regulators rejected Kalshi's election predictions for the 2024 US presidential election, arguing that the predictions resembled gambling. Lopes Lara then suggested suing the CFTC. "All the other investors in the company thought it was a terrible idea," Partovi recalled. But the two of them decided to go ahead anyway.

In September 2024, a U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of Kalshi, making the company the first regulated election prediction market in the U.S. in over a century, a historic achievement. “We genuinely want everything to be regulated because our vision is to build the world’s largest financial exchange,” said Lopes Lara. “Legal compliance is a principle we will never compromise on.” In the lead-up to the election, Kalshi users wagered over $500 million on candidates and accurately predicted President Trump's victory a month before election night. (Polymarket users wagered a total of $3.6 billion in presidential elections.)

“Nothing trains your courage and perseverance in the face of ‘no’ more than becoming a professional ballet dancer, where injury or even a short break can mean losing your position,” said Alex Immerman, a partner at a16z. “Lopes Lara learned graceful perseverance early on, and she brought that composure and confidence to the creation of Kalshi.”

Despite initial skepticism about Kalshi's ability to maintain its growth momentum after the presidential election, the company says its trading volume currently exceeds $1 billion per week, with over 90% of that volume coming from sports predictions. In January, Donald Trump Jr. joined Kaishi's advisory board. (Trump Jr. also joined the advisory board of its competitor Polymarket last September.)

Kalshi has already integrated with brokerages such as Robinhood and Webull, and even brought in hedge fund Susquehanna International Group to increase liquidity in its markets. Recently, Kalshi has partnered with several companies, including the National Hockey League (NHL) and online trading platform StockX, and is aggressively expanding into the cryptocurrency space through integration with blockchain platform Solana. The company stated that the newly acquired funds will be used to expand its integrations with brokerages and establish new partnerships with news media.

However, Kalshi still faces regulatory pressure from various states, which have filed lawsuits against Kalshi's sports prediction market, arguing that these predictions should be regulated and taxed by the states. But given the company's success in overcoming what once seemed like insurmountable regulatory hurdles, Kalshi's investors remain confident in the founders' ability to move forward. For Seibel, who has invested in thousands of companies throughout his career, this is just the beginning: "I don't know if we've ever invested in a company with such a huge potential impact on the world as Kalshi."

Related Reading

Sued in seven states while raising $11 billion in funding: A Tale of Ice and Fire for prediction market star Kalshi