How Kalshi’s Cofounder Went From Professional Ballerina To World’s Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire

Kalshi is now worth $11 billion, making both its founders billionaires and Luana Lopes Lara the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire.

By Alicia Park, Contributor
Originally Published by Forbes | December 2, 2025, Updated December 4, 2025

Luana Lopes Lara graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science, spent college summers working for Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities and built an $11 billion startup in just six years. Yet the Brazilian native still calls high school the “most intense years of her life.” Her ballet teachers at Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil held lit cigarettes under her thigh while she extended one leg to her ear—it was a test to see how long she could keep that leg up without getting burned. Fellow dancers would hide glass shards in each other’s shoes to get ahead, and the cutthroat program required her to take academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon before taking ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.

But her mind was always set on grander ambitions: wanting to become the next Steve Jobs. In part inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, Lopes Lara would study well into the night for academic competitions, winning gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad. Following high school graduation (in December), she performed as a professional ballerina in Austria for nine months before hanging up her pointe shoes to attend MIT and fulfill her ambitions in America.

Now, at age 29, Lopes Lara has just become the youngest self-made woman billionaire on Earth, unseating 31-year-old Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo who took the title from Taylor Swift in April. She and her cofounder, Tarek Mansour, also 29, both moved into the three-comma club after their prediction market firm Kalshi raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation. Crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm led the round, announced Tuesday, with participation from investors Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator among others.

The company—which allows users to bet on the outcome of future events such as elections, sports games and pop culture happenings—was worth $5 billion after raising $300 million in October and $2 billion after raising $185 million in June. Kalshi’s valuation has quintupled in less than six months, boosting the net worths of the young cofounders, who each own an estimated 12% of the company, to $1.3 billion each.

“There’s a lot of other people wanting a piece of this business now that Kalshi has shown how big it is,” says Ali Partovi, CEO of venture fund Neo, which was a seed investor in Kalshi. Since July, notional trading volume on Kalshi has jumped eightfold, reaching $5.8 billion in November, according to the company. Notional trades on its chief competitor Polymarket, whose own valuation has shot up to $9 billion, have more than tripled since July to $4.3 billion in November, according to Dune Analytics.

Lopes Lara and Mansour, who grew up in Lebanon, met at MIT where they were part of the same friend group of international students and took similar classes, both majoring in computer science. Mansour, who lived through the 2007 Lebanon conflict and taught himself English while studying for the SATs, remembers how Lopes Lara would always sit in the front row at lectures. The two became close after he began sitting next to her in class to learn from her and became even closer after both landing internships at Five Rings Capital in New York City in 2018. It was on their walks back home to their intern apartments in the Financial District one night that the idea of a prediction market business clicked…[MORE]

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