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Author: Alicia Park, Source: Forbes,
Original title: How Kalshi’s Cofounder Went From Professional Ballerina To World’s Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire
Kalshi is currently valued at US$11 billion, making its two co-founders (Luana Lopes Lara and Tarek Mansour) billionaires. Among them, Luana Lopes Lara has become the youngest female self-made billionaire in the world.
Luana graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science.
While in college, her summer internships included working at Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investments.In just six years, she built a startup valued at $11 billion.
Yet the Brazilian-born entrepreneur still calls high school “the most intense years of her life”: At Brazil’s Balljoy Theater School, her ballet teacher once put a lit cigarette under her thigh as she stretched her leg to her ear – to test how long she could hold the position without getting burned.
Luana studied at the Balljoy Theater School in Brazil, and in 2014 went to the Salzburg State Theater in Austria to dance professionally for “Swan Lake”.
In addition to the brutal training program in which dancers hide shards of glass in each other’s shoes to stay ahead of the competition, she has to take cultural classes from 7 a.m. to noon and conduct ballet training from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.
The rigor and intensity of ballet training are just a small part of her larger ambitions:She wants to be the next Steve Jobs.
Inspired in part by her mother, a mathematics teacher, and her father, an electrical engineer, Luana studied late into the night for academic competitions and won a gold medal at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.
For nine months after high school (after graduating that December), she performed as a professional ballet dancer in Austria before kicking off her ballet shoes and embarking on the next phase of her journey in the United States.
Now, 29-year-old Luana just became the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet, replacing 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, who took the title from Taylor Swift in April.
She and co-founder Tarek Mansour, also 29, both entered the “three-comma club” (net worth over a billion dollars) after their prediction markets company raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation.
Crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm led the round, which was announced on Tuesday and also included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator among other investors.
The company, which allows users to place bets on the outcome of future events such as elections, sports and pop culture happenings, was valued at $5 billion after raising $300 million last October and $2 billion after raising $185 million last June.In less than six months, Kalshi’s valuation has soared more than fivefold, boosting the net worth of the two young co-founders – each estimated to own about 12% of the company – to $1.3 billion.
Luana Lopez Lara (left) and Tarek Mansour (right) founded Kalshi in 2018.
“Now that Kalshi has shown how big the market is, there are now a lot of other people who want a piece of the pie,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of venture fund Neo, which was a seed investor in the company.
Kalshi’s notional trading volume has grown eightfold since July, reaching $5.8 billion in November, according to the company.
According to data from Dune Analytics, the trading volume of its main competitor Polymarket has more than tripled since July, reaching $4.3 billion, and its own valuation has soared to $9 billion.
Luana and Mansour, who grew up in Lebanon, met at MIT. They were members of the same international student friend circle, taking similar courses, and both majored in computer science.
Mansour, who lived through the 2007 conflict in Lebanon and taught himself English in preparation for the SAT, remembers Luana always sitting in the front row of class.The two became familiar after Mansoor began sitting next to her and learning from her, and became even more so when they both landed internships at Five Rings Capital in New York City in 2018.
One night, as they were walking back to their intern apartment in the Financial District, the idea for a prediction markets business clicked.
“What we see is that most deals happen when people have some kind of vision for the future and then try to find a way to bring it to market,” Luana previously told Forbes.She added that traders and investors will factor external events — such as election results or the possibility of natural disasters — into their investment decisions.
Based on the belief that there should be a way to trade the probability of an event happening directly, rather than indirectly through traditional financial markets, they applied to the startup accelerator Y Combinator and were accepted in 2019.
But the legality of prediction markets was unclear, and the co-founders soon faced an uphill battle.Michael Seibel, a partner emeritus at Y Combinator, recalls the early days of working with the pair: When they realized they needed federal approval to legally operate a prediction market, they contacted more than 40 law firms for help, but none wanted to help because the founders were too young and the company was too small.
“We took a huge risk right out of college. There was no product for two whole years—nothing launched—and if we didn’t get regulatory approval, the company would be ground zero,” recalls López Lara.During the pandemic, she tried to build her business in London, while Mansour returned home to Beirut.(He was there through the city’s deadly port explosion that killed more than 200 people, and for weeks he worked on Kalshi’s work at night and during the day helping to clean up neighborhoods and search for survivors.)
All it took was a lawyer to say yes: Jeff Bandman, who formerly worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, helped founders work through their applications for federal approval and helped mediate when regulators objected.In November 2020, Kalshi received approval from the CFTC to become a designated contract market, which classifies its prediction market as a type of derivative called an “event contract.”
This approval also sets them apart from the competitive landscape.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 marketplace.
All this gave Kalshi the advantage for a while.(Polymarket was approved to launch in the U.S. last September. Its founder, Shane Copeland, is 27 and has become one of the youngest billionaires thanks to a recent $2 billion investment from his New York Stock Exchange parent company.)
However, the regulatory battle does not end there.In late 2023, when regulators rejected an election contract launched by Kalshi ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election on the grounds that “election contracts resembled gambling,” it was Luana who came up with the idea of suing the CFTC.“All the other investors in the company said that would be a terrible idea,” Partovi recalls.But the two men did it anyway.
In September 2024, a U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of Kalshi, making the companyAmerica’s first regulated election contracts market in more than a century, created history.
“We really want to do things the right way becauseOur vision is to build the largest financial exchange in the world,” Luana said.”Operating legally is something we cannot compromise on.”
Kalshi’s user base doubled in the run-up to the election, with users betting more than $500 million on Trump or Kamala Harris.Its users correctly predicted President Trump’s victory a month before Election Night.(Polymarket users have placed $3.6 billion in total bets on the presidential election.)
“There are few better trainings than being a professional ballet dancer to teach you to keep going when you’re told ‘no’ – an injury or even a short break can mean losing your spot,” said a16z partner Alex Imerman.“Luana learned graceful persistence early on…and she brought this quiet confidence to the founding of Kalshi.”
While there were initial doubts that it could maintain momentum after the U.S. presidential election, Kalshi said weekly trading volume now exceeds $1 billion, with more than 90% of that volume driven by sports contracts.In January, Donald Trump Jr. joined Kalshi’s advisory board.(Trump Jr. also joined the advisory board of rival Polymarket last September.)
Kalshi has now integrated with brokers like Robinhood and Webull, and has even brought 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 has even made a big push into the crypto space through an integration with blockchain platform Solana.
The company said the new funding will be used to expand integrations with brokers and strike 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 they should be regulated and taxed at the state level.But given the company’s success in overcoming regulatory hurdles that once seemed impossible, Kalshi’s investors remain bullish on the founder’s ability to overcome the odds.
For Seibel, a Y Combinator partner who has invested in thousands of companies during his career, this moment is just the beginning: “To my knowledge, we have never invested in a company that has such a huge potential impact on the world.”
