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 becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.

Luana graduated from MIT with a degree in computer science.

During her college years, her summer internships included working at Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin's Citadel. In just six years, she built a startup valued at $11 billion.

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

Luana attended the Ballet School of the Teatro Bolshoi in Brazil and performed professionally in "Swan Lake" at the Salzburg State Theatre in Austria in 2014.

To get ahead in competitions, dancers would hide glass shards in each other's ballet shoes. In addition, the grueling training regimen required her to study academic subjects from 7 AM to noon and ballet training from 1 PM to 9 PM.

The harshness and intensity of ballet training were just a small part of her larger ambitions: she wanted to become the next Steve Jobs.

Inspired in part by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, 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 Math Olympiad.

In the nine months after graduating 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.

Now, at 29, Luana has just become the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet, replacing 31-year-old Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, who lost the title to her in April from Taylor Swift.

She and her fellow 29-year-old co-founder Tarek Mansour both entered the "three comma club" (net worth exceeding one billion dollars) after their prediction market company raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation.

The round was led by crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm, announced on Tuesday, with other investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator.

The company allows users to bet on the outcomes of future events (such as elections, sports events, and pop culture events), and its valuation soared from $5 billion after a $300 million funding round in October last year to $11 billion after a $1.85 billion funding round in June last year. In less than six months, Kalshi's valuation skyrocketed more than fivefold, increasing the net worth of both young co-founders (each estimated to hold about 12% of the company) to $1.3 billion.

Luana Lopes Lara (left) and Tarek Mansour (right) founded Kalshi in 2018.

"Now that Kalshi has demonstrated how big this market is, many others want a piece of the pie," said Ali Patoway, CEO of the venture fund Neo, which was a seed investor in the company.

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

According to Dune Analytics, its main competitor Polymarket's trading volume has more than doubled since July, reaching $4.3 billion, with its own valuation soaring to $9 billion.

Luana, who grew up in Lebanon, and Mansour met at MIT, where they were part of the same international student friend group, taking similar courses and majoring in computer science.

Mansour, who self-taught English while preparing for the SATs during the 2007 Lebanon conflict, remembers Luana always sitting in the front row of class. After Mansour started sitting next to her to learn from her, they became familiar, and their bond deepened after both secured internships at Five Rings Capital in New York City in 2018.

One night, while walking back to their intern apartment in the financial district, the idea for a prediction market business became clear.

"We saw that most trading happens 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 likelihood of election results or natural disasters—into their investment decisions.

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

However, the legality of prediction markets was unclear, and the co-founders soon faced a tough battle. Y Combinator's partner Michael Seibel recalls the early days of working with them: when they realized they needed federal approval to operate a prediction market legally, 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 out of college, we were taking on huge risks. For two whole years, we had no product—nothing was released—if we didn't get regulatory approval, the company would be worth zero," Lopes Lara recalled. During the pandemic, she tried to establish a business in London while Mansour returned to his home in Beirut. (There, he experienced the deadly port explosion that killed over 200 people, spending weeks handling Kalshi work at night while helping to clean up the community and search for survivors during the day.)

Ultimately, it only took one lawyer to say "yes": Jeff Bandman, who had worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), helped the founders complete the application for federal approval and assisted them in negotiations when the regulatory agency 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 federally regulated 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 granted permission to launch in the U.S. last September. Its founder, Shane Coplan, is 27 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 request to launch election contracts before the 2024 U.S. presidential election on the grounds that "election contracts are similar to gambling," it was Luana who proposed suing the CFTC. "All of the other investors in the company said that would be a bad idea," Patoway recalled. But the two went ahead anyway.

In September 2024, a U.S. district court judge ruled in favor of Kalshi, making the company the first regulated election contract market in the U.S. in over a century, creating history.

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

In the lead-up to the election, Kalshi's user base doubled, with users betting over $500 million on Trump or Kamala Harris. Its users correctly predicted President Trump's victory a month before election night. (Polymarket users bet a total of $3.6 billion on the presidential election.)

"There are few better trainings than being a professional ballerina that can teach you to keep going when you're told 'no'—an injury or even a brief break can mean losing your position," said a16z partner Alex Immerman. "Luana learned graceful persistence early on… and she brought that calm confidence to the founding process of Kalshi."

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

Kalshi has now integrated with brokers like Robinhood and Webull, even bringing in hedge fund Susquehanna International Group to add liquidity to its market. Recently, Kalshi has signed partnerships with companies ranging from the National Hockey League to online marketplace StockX, and even made a major foray into the crypto space through integration with blockchain platform Solana.

The company stated that new funds will be used to expand integrations with brokers and establish new partnerships with news organizations.

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

For Seibel, a Y Combinator partner who has invested in thousands of companies throughout his career, this moment is just the beginning: "In my mind, we've never invested in a company that has such a huge potential impact on the world."

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