New York, December 4, 2025 – In a story that blends the discipline of classical ballet with the high-stakes world of fintech innovation, 29-year-old Luana Lopes Lara has become the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. The Brazilian-born entrepreneur, once a professional ballerina performing in Austria, now holds a stake in Kalshi, the prediction market platform she co-founded, which has reached an $11 billion valuation following a $1 billion funding round. Her estimated net worth of approximately $1.3 billion, derived from her roughly 12% ownership, places her ahead of previous record-holders like Scale AI’s Lucy Guo and Taylor Swift.
Kalshi has transformed how people trade on future events. The platform allows users to buy and sell event contracts—simple yes/no bets on outcomes ranging from elections and sports results to economic data and cultural milestones. These contracts pay $1 if correct and nothing if wrong, creating a regulated new asset class that CEO and co-founder Tarek Mansour describes as “literally a completely new financial product.” Trading volume now routinely exceeds $1 billion per week, up over 1,000% from 2024, with millions of users across 140 countries and integrations with major brokerages like Robinhood and Webull.
Luana Lopes Lara grew up in Brazil, the daughter of a mathematics teacher and an electrical engineer. As a teenager she trained at the prestigious Bolshoi Theatre School in Brazil, enduring an intensely demanding schedule that combined morning academics with up to ten hours of daily dance practice. The environment was unforgiving—teachers tested dancers’ endurance in extreme ways, and sabotage among competitors was not uncommon. Yet she excelled both artistically and intellectually, winning gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.
After high school, Lopes Lara performed professionally for nine months with the Salzburger Landestheater in Austria, dancing leading roles in Swan Lake. At age 19 she left the stage to study computer science and mathematics at MIT, where she later earned a master’s degree while conducting research on decision-making under uncertainty. During her college summers she interned at Bridgewater Associates and Citadel, immersing herself in quantitative trading and probabilistic forecasting.
The idea for Kalshi crystallized in 2018 while Lopes Lara and fellow MIT graduate Tarek Mansour were interning together in New York. They realized that much of traditional finance is indirectly driven by predictions about the future, yet no regulated venue existed for directly trading those predictions. They founded Kalshi that year (launching operations in 2019) with the goal of building the first federally regulated exchange for event contracts.
The early years were dominated by regulatory battles. For nearly two years the company operated without a live product while the founders sought approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). They were rejected by 65 law firms before finding counsel willing to take on the case. Approval finally arrived in November 2020, making Kalshi the first Designated Contract Market ever authorized to offer event contracts.
Growth accelerated dramatically after that milestone, but new obstacles emerged. In 2023 the CFTC attempted to block election-related contracts, arguing they posed risks to public interest. Kalshi sued, and in September 2024 a federal judge ruled in the company’s favor, followed by an appeals court victory the next month. The decisions cleared the way for the first legal U.S. election betting markets in over a century. By Election Day 2024, Kalshi users had wagered more than $500 million on the presidential race alone, with the platform’s odds proving more accurate than most polls weeks in advance.
Kalshi’s valuation has since exploded: $2 billion in June 2025, $5 billion in October after a $300 million round led by Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, and now $11 billion following the $1 billion Series E announced on December 2, 2025, led by Paradigm and backed by Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Meritech Capital, IVP, ARK Invest, Anthos Capital, and CapitalG.
With Lopes Lara and Mansour each holding approximately 12% of the company, both have crossed the billionaire threshold. Early investor Ali Partovi, CEO of Neo, noted that “there’s a lot of other people wanting a piece of this business now that Kalshi has shown how big it is.”
Despite the whirlwind success, Lopes Lara often credits her ballet background for the resilience that carried her through years of regulatory rejection and high-pressure growth. The same discipline that once kept her en pointe for hours now fuels a company reshaping global finance.
From the rigorous studios of Brazil and Austria to the trading floors of a new asset class, Luana Lopes Lara’s journey is a striking reminder that the paths to transformative entrepreneurship can begin far from Silicon Valley—and that grace under pressure, whether on stage or in the courtroom, can be worth billions.
